Clutterrific! - Week 8

[huaw mcmaster ca]

Unfortunately I don't have a video to share this week for a couple of reasons, but it's mainly been modifications to the screensaver which combines Clutter and ODE anyways.  I managed to get some faint shadows working to give a sense of depth between photos, but the main downside is less realism (I'm not exactly sure why, but it might have something to do with light shadows with sharp boundaries).  I might end up removing that since it detracts from the overall feel.  There's also some random snapping of ropes which spices things up a bit, and I like how it looks generally.  I haven't had much luck completely eliminating the physics instability, but it only seems to happen in some pathologically bad cases early on in the simulation.

This whole experiment with incorporating physics behaviour into Clutter has been a bit tedious because it's not what Clutter was really intended for, so I'll spend this week looking into Clutter-Box2D and seeing if any of those ideas can extend to some reusable code for incorporating 3D physics into Clutter.  I'll also take a better look at Bullet physics to see if it reacts better to the potential instability.