How to rotate a bunch of objects around a common center?

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
#1

I have a bunch of objects which are components of a larger structure, which I want to allow a game user to cause to rotate around a common center. (And there will be additional objects which I’ll want to be able to be rotated around a different common centera). I’m thinking to link them all to an empty mesh, and then provide to rotate the empty mesh and therefor also the objects linked to it.

So, first of all, is this the proper way to do what I want,
and, second, since there are a lot of these objects, is there a SCRIPT which could accomplish that linking in a batch sense?

#2
  1. Sounds like a good idea. I don’t really like to use empties - I’d rather just use invisible cubes or something you can see when you want to. Empties also seem to mess with certain things in the BGE, though I can’t provide any examples right now.
  2. A script, huh? Well, if you have your objects in a list or named appropriately, then a script could easily sort the objects and parent them all to the center object. Are you familiar with Python at all?
#3

No, not very familiar with Python, the most I did for these objects re Python script was found a batch load script for another file type and replace the previous file type in the script with .stl, and it worked just fine. But I find that I really don’t need to do the linking with a script, I can just go to Outliner, <shift>LMB each object in succesion and then the empty mesh, and then use <ctrl> P to parent the mesh to the objects. And that seems to work ok, too.

But I have another problem, I’ll put it in another thread.

#4

Oh, okay. I assumed you meant parent them in-game - the Player would add things in-game, and the game would parent them together so that you would be able to rotate it all. Yes, simply selecting each object successively and then using Ctrl-P would allow you to parent everything together.