Platform & Physic = Fiesta

Hello everyone. Before you start, yes, I know that Platform Behavior and Physic Behaviour don't match together, no worries.

It's exactly why I'm actually here. I have some questions about it, and I'll be glad if you take some time for me

So ! I'm currently working on a platform game. My animations are ready, so are my layouts. Here we go :

1) So I absolutely need of Physic in my game, so I have to add this behaviour to everything (ground, sprites and blablabla). Okay. But now, I suppose that I have to define every single move and control of the character by myself in the events sheet, right ? (It's not a problem if there is no alternative, I'm just curious. But If I had to do it, I'll do).

2) Physic is love, Physic is life. But Physic is expensive too. And I don't really know how much. As I said, I'll add physic to every objects in my main layout, but I have to draw the polygon collision points myself too (cause C2 knows what a square is, but certainly don't know how to deal with my different platforms). The fact is : I'll probably end up with 14 or 15 sprites composed of 20 or more polygon collision points. It's recommanded to never exceed 4 or 8 so...well. Huehuehue I guess. How much is that important ? Will my game really by slow and heavy because of that ?

3) It's not REALLY connected to my previous questions but, I'm curious about the object "light Shadow". Well. I've seen some creations with it and I was like "Oh my golden fish, this is gorgeous" but I didn't try it yet and I don't know if it's compatible with everything-is-freaking-physic-in-this-layout-dude-deal-with-it. Is it ? (I'll read the doc about it as soon as possible, I just ask)

Thanks in advance if you can answer me mates.

Cordialy

Please refrain from swearing (amended). There are many different age groups who frequent this forum.

Noted, sorry

I wrote my own physics based platform behaviour for Umbra. It was challenging... However, that started as more of an experiment before it took on a life of its own. The physics engine is not expensive on performance (desktop) and there's nothing wrong with using physics and platform behaviours together on screen, as long as you don't use them together (against each other) to try to move objects around. It all depends on what effect you want to create.

Edit: assign physics and solid to families, and use hidden sprites to assign the behaviours to complex/static objects. Just a suggestion...

Hum that's very interesting, can I ask how did you do your own behavior ? Is it in HTML5 or just by using the Custom Behavior option ? Where and How can I do that exactly ? Can't be so hard I guess, I just need Box2D with the controls of the platform behavior.

(Plus I looked Umbra, seems to be a great work dude !)

It took me approx 700 events to get the physics behaviour to behave the way I wanted it to. Think of it as a 20 mode FSM, with each stage progressively added onto the last, starting with a simple move left/right with appropriate accel/decel profiles, then jump, then land, then crawl, then push/pull another physics object, and so on... It was all done using events to control the player's physics object, stop it from bouncing, move it up/down slopes correctly for the appearance I wanted. A real in-depth and fun project, but it took on a bit of a life of its own - it was good fun to do but, now I've done it, I'm not sure that I'd do it again (I'm drawing up another platformer while I wait for Steam Greenlight, and it will not use phyiscs for the player). It might be easier to use the Chipmunk physics plugin, if you're unfamiliar with both, because that at least permits you to have more access to core physics behaviours and information than the c2 physics port of Box2d does.

Edit: I'm now familiar with the limitations of c2 physics engine, and their are small modifications that can be made to permit kinematic bodies, so I might consider making a personal port of it to work with if I need to.