NEWTONIAN DROP is a physics demo-installation created in Valve Software’s Source Engine. Players learn about basic physics concepts like gravity and elasticity while navigating a science research center. Since Source is powered by the Havok physics engine, players can interact with the various objects within the exhibit to observe real-world phsyical dynamics. NEWTONIAN DROP was designed primarily as a teaching tool for young physics students but it also showcases how objects react to a player’s input within a 3D realm.
The project was part of the Building Virtual Worlds course at MDM, and took two weeks to complete.
My task on this project was to learn as much as I could about the Source engine SDK and creating and compiling 3D assets into a Source-engine Mod. Contrary to my expectations, there is precious little documentation online about this process, and the Source engine SDK (and it’s associated Hammer level-editor) are far from user-friendly. Although I was eventually able to bring objects into the game, creating animations and importing them turned out to be too time consuming and convoluted a process, and in the interest of conserving time, the team decided to abandon the idea.
It turned out the Hammer editor lacked the ability to scale objects within the editor, and so a standard scaling system had to be devised for all the 3D assets I was creating. It was also extremely difficult to find out how to create custom shaders for Source. The experience was fraught with complications and designers were forced to cut out much of what they had conceptualized in the pre-production phase. Creating a world that was visually distinct from the Half Life games themselves was a crucial factor for us and proved trickier than we had aniticipated. Given the time we had and the fact that we were creating the entire project completely from scratch, I am glad we were successfully able to create a compelling 3D experience.
C R E D I T S
Seth Marinello
David Marhal
Felwa Abukhodair
Brian Ford
Fouad Hafiz
