Ventures of an ex indie game developer

Last bug fix

I just spent three days fixing the last known bug of my tool chain: cylinder/capsule orientation. In Maya Y-axis is "up", in my game engine Z-axis is up; both using right-handed orientation of course. This wouldn't be a problem if I hadn't grown the tool organically, but now it's riddled with transformation special casing and matrix hacks. For instance I model things with meshes as roots (since you sometimes want to produce visible things without collision geometry) but then flip it around in the tool, as I want the meshes to follow the physical positions as simulated in the game engine. I also made it so that the Maya user can model the object facing himself, but if it is an object within the game ("a car") it should be turned 180° to face forward. Long story short: my Python "import object" code is a mess and it took me three days to finally solve this cylinder/capsule orientation bug. Never write hacks for core software.

My simulator is hinge-jointed cylinder hinge-jointed to cylinder U-jointed to cylinder and it seems to work - I'll be damned if this bug surfaces again.


The bounding boxes are drawn in bright colors. Note the strange physical object in the background. It's some physical part of a huge shelf seems to have ended up behind the back wall of the level. I'm not able to find this shelf in Maya, although I can find it when I manually inspect the file... I should really do some Maya training.

About the author

Mitt foto
Gothenburg, Sweden