Hey, sorry for the late reply (also to your email)... colliding deformable, spline based softbodies is not exactly the easiest exercise, especially if you're already thinking the given examples are too hard to get into/understand. The next release of verletphysics will have some utilities to help with the shape creation parts of that (i.e. the ParticlePath & ParticleString classes), but the collision detection & resolution would still be down to you.

The approach I've taken for Nokia Friends was to connect all vertices of each blob with each other in order to form a separate entity/group of related particles. Then each frame check each particle's distance to all other blobs (i.e. their particles) and if it's less than a threshold distance (e.g. 10 pixels) create a temporary spring between that closest particle of that other blob and the currently checked one... this spring would only remain alive as long as the 2 particles are still too close to each other and then be removed again. You can also watch this behaviour in the video below... The short cyan lines are these temporary springs keeping all blobs away from each other.

http://www.vimeo.com/702576

Sorry to double post.  But, I just finished up working out acceptable mechanics for the colliding softbodies.  No, it isn't fit for Audi engineers or medical device design, but it will be fine for my app, or anyone who is making games or illustrative sort of work.

So there.


Not only that, but I have commented them up, from just using a Spline2D object, all the way to a multi-object array of blobs that squich up when they hit each other.  And the whole 5 part "tutorial" series is available to you, Toxi, to post on your site, if you feel they aren't too n00by for you.    You may not want to be associated with them.

One more thing, T. When the "tightness" on a Spline2D is increased, the curve gets zig-zaggy in an ugly way.

Can you send some instructions to fix that problem?  I'd like a smoother line.

Could you provide the code that made that Verlet collision demo?

Thanks.  In all seriousness, even the little sliver of your libs that I am using will make a huge improvement to my project.  You did a lot of great work.