Articles tagged with “linkages” are about moving the pistons and rods that make a locomotive appear to operate in SL.
Today we’ll see if we can do the piston rod. We’ll stick with the horizontal version for now. Wish me luck!
After our brief trip into AI-suggested code for finding points, let’s get back to the main thread here, defining linkages and animating them. A bit of progress.
I asked the evil LLM for a polar coordinates solution using a vector type. It is hard to dislike the result.
I have sinned: I allowed an “AI” to write some code for me. I am astonished and ashamed.
I’ve been reading a bit about linkages and forward kinematics. That leads, after a bounce or two to geometry and algebra.
A timing test for the table-style object creation. After that, I don’t know yet.
Today, we’ll consolidate some of our learning into the code. The idea is to have a system that we can use readily.
I’ve decided to use my vector class with the linkages. It should make things easier to express. We’ll find out.
The linkage-to-SVG yak is sufficiently shaved. Its supporting yak, the SVG library Group object is also sufficiently shaved. Now can we get back to the reason we came here?
By Odin, I think she’s got it!
Behold the awesome power of … POLYMORPHISM!!!
OK, let’s try to add a Group to Suzanna’s SVG library. How hard could it be?
It would be a lot easier to be sure that my test linkages are working if I could see pictures. That’s nearly convenient. Nearly.
OK, moving right along, now comes the learning. (distance/radius doesn’t really count.) Let’s make a new linkage piece and make it connect.
I have done the calculations to move the elements of a linkage, more than once, in LSL. It’s tedious and error-prone. Might SLua be more helpful? (Mistakes will be made below.)