Box2D Forums

Hey, just getting started with Box2D (flash), and found what seems to be a glaring omission to the joints: a "weld" joint, a joint that constrains on all 3 DOF.

Basically, my intended use is to provide rigidity to structures, then break the joint on force. Simulates nails, welds, etc. My current solution is to use a revolute or prismatic joint with extremely tight limiting, but this tends to result in joints that are a little "squishy" -- these joints seem to tend to have more give against their limits than against their constriants. Plus it's a lot more of a pain to set up than a simple weld would be, and I'm guessing a weld would be faster to compute, as well.

All in all though, enjoying the system a lot. Thanks!!

Instead of a weld joint, I recommend using multiple shapes per body. Then use some heuristic based on contact data about when a shape should be split off into its own body.

With an iterative solver like the one in Box2D, a weld joint will never provide complete rigidity.

Yeah, I investigated doing it with that way (breaking apart shapes), but because constraints provide such a simple way of determining when to break, and breaking them is such a simple process, I'm willing to sacrifice a little rigidity for ease of use.

Now that I'm considering it more, I definitely see the advantages to doing it the way you describe and will progress in that direction (thanks! ), but I still feel that a weld joint is a kind of "basic component" that box2d could benefit from.

Yeah, it would not be hard to implement the weld joint. I'm just concerned that people will go down the wrong route for breakable objects.

What would be better is some breakable body functionality. If you come up with a good solution, please consider submitting your code to improve Box2D.

Simple way to make weld joint is for example prismatic with both upper and lower limit set to 0.

I made simple breakable objects different way. When the object's health drops below zero, it is deleted and gibs are spawned on its position. I made gibs of polygon shapes with offset of their real relative position, so it looks very realistic