What if we had walking in BeamNG? Imagine that, walking dummies, or maybe an AT-ST Walker. I wonder if that's possible?
I'd imagine the only n/b object that could feasibly walk would be a Strandbeest. I have my doubts about other objects walking, but I've been proven wrong before.
guess it depends on how crazy the vehicle lua system lets you get, I am yet to look into it although I'm thinking the success on drowsysams forklift indicates at least some flexibility in lua binding vehicle controls to hydros in a custom way. My wager is on possible. I would love to attempt it aswell, but if I am writing code for a walker I'd rather just buy some servos and actually make myself a walking robot IRL - oh wait, I have (albeit a 4 servo biped using 3d printed parts somebody else gave me)
Actually I was thinking about how you could simply read the accelerate/brake and steering and hope the lua system is flexible enough to calculate the IK for the legs from that.
Actually building a viable leg system would likely be fairly doable as far as the pure JBeam goes, however getting it to actually walk? You'd need some devilishly complex LUA code for it. It would be effectively the same as trying to program a physical biped (or quad, hex, etc.), since you would be dealing with the full physics simulation. Long story short, unless someone wants to fire up some crazy fancy LUA programming, modeling, and JBeaming, it seems highly unlikely.
I don't think something like this: (imported from here) would need any trick LUA just to function. It's basically a crankshaft connected to a bunch of conrods. The crank would have to be a prism structure with a coltri'd fan on either end. Carlosair's Winds app can be used to spin them up for the walking motion. It'll only be able to walk backwards and forward, but the principle of having a walking object is there. jbeaming a full walking bobcat would be an entirely different kettle of fish.
A fixed walking animation probably wouldn't be too hard, but an actual balancing robot able to adapt to obstacles/terrain would be incredibly difficult and require much the same type of control system code that real robots need.
True, a working Strandbeest style machine would be interesting, and could likely be made controllable and motorized fairly easily. Building something that wouldn't look out of place in a Mechwarrior game, however...
Its possible, although its a bit crude BeamNG needs commands for this to be possible of course which it doesn't currently have (they should be high up on the dev list though)
I remember when that video came out... and I was gonna post it here as well actually. I think that when that came out we were at RoR 0.29? So BeamNG already is far more advanced then RoR was back then, it was just a lot easier to put commands to hydros in a .truck file then it seems to be (going by what everyone is saying) then it is at the moment in BeamNG. I bet when something like triggers is added, it will be a lot easier to build a smooth running biped.
Hydros with custom lua can do anything RoR commands could, and more. Well, there's a lack of reserved keys for controlling them, but that's not needed for a walker. As others said, simple mechanical link walkers would work well already. Looks like someone did a video of my RoR spider, similar to Strandbeest but different linkage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3TPbN8PDlA More complex balancing walkers would be hard, but I'd say they they can be done with the current features. I started a four legged walker, it doesn't do much yet.
