Whelp, it’s 3 AM and we’re six hours into the jam. I think I’m going to be heading to bed pretty soon, but here’s the results of the first 1/12 of the jam.

Team: Bret Hudson (me), and Dan Fessler

We didn’t start until about 2.5 hours after the jam started, since we had a bit of a difficulty coming up with an idea (which I’ll go more into tomorrow), and then both of us decided to grab some food. Here’s my work thus far: (click the links to watch 6 second vine videos of the thing in motion!)

Centripetal motion

This was a bit interesting to get working, as I went through a few iterations. I wanted to make sure I didn’t do my typical Cos/Sin method with an angle, because the planets are going to be affected by outside forces, so it was important to make sure we were using real physics. I ended up using the cross product of two 3D vectors to get the result.

Chain physics

I had never tackled chain physics before, but understood the basic concept. You need points and then the springs between them. The points have a mass and it determines how the springs interact. Thanks to a tutorial by NeHe (link here), I was able to get it up and going rather quickly.

There’s something else I’ve been working on regarding the chain physics, but it’s buggy, and requires me to do some more thinking on how exactly it all interacts. I’ll be uploading a video of the final result when I’m done. That’s about it!

Also, Dan is still working on concept art as we speak. No pretty pictures for you yet, but soon!