Detection of "non actor" objects

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
1

The question is simple: is there a way to detect game objects that are not actors with a “near” type sensor?

Situation: Ball-and-paddle game, big levels - so lots of stones to destroy. I cannot make all the stones actors (physics collapses…).

Now I also want to use rockets to shoot stones. What I did: create a spheric “sensor” type object where the rocket hit, increase its size constantly (till a limit) and “weaken” all stones that it hit (with a collision sensor). This is practical, because it’s easy to make it look like a real explosion damaging right at the edge of the sphere. This works nice, but the explosion is not stopped by walls (which are not destroyable). The near sensor would be stopped by the wall but doesn’t work on “non actor” stones.

I also found no way to set the affected stones to actor type temporary via python. If I could to that I would first detect a stone by collision (as described), set the stone to actor and then check with near if its “visible” for the explosion.

I hope someone can help me again…

2

as far as I know, actor makes an object only being detected by the physics engine, and not being physically correct calculated. I think you should be able to make them all actors, as long as they stay static objects.
But I think the ray-, touch- or collisionsensors should also be able to detect non-actor objects.
Hope I could help you.

3

Hmmm, maybe I can code something with a ray sensor checking whether the “found” stone is visible… I will test if the ray type sensor sees non actor objects.
Making all stones (few hundreds) actors actually slows down physics VERY - I don’t know why, because I also thought it would not affect physics as long as they are static objects.

4

did you try it with not having them be actors? maybe its just slow because of the huge polygon count or something.

5

Sure :slight_smile:
Everything runs fluently with non actors. And in the runtime parameters I can clearly see that it’s a physics slowdown, not coming from the rasterizer.

6

I think ray sensors only work with actors. Are the blocks ghosts? I don’t think they have to be collision-enabled to be detected with sensors.

7

The ray works with non-actors, but is quite unpractical in usage here, near would be just perfect.
The stones need to be not ghosts because the balls have to bounce off them and the paddle should not be able to move through them.