Real Time Rope, Is it Possible?

Hi,
I want to use the game engine to help create realistic looking animations. For Instance, to make a swinging rope. I could just use python to make an armature deform a mesh according to the laws of physics, time step throug frames and save it as an animation. I like using python because I can use mathmatics to ensure that the animation looks physically correct. However, why build what amounts to a physics engine in python when blender allready has one? Also, I might want to interact with animations like these in the future so I want to try to use the game engine to accomplish this.

I’m still a noob so bare with me if this is easy. I have read that we cannot deform meshes in the game engine. Is that true? I was thinking of making a row of spheres, making them all dynamic and using the near sensor and a script to ensure they stay daisy-chained. It won’t look like a rope, but I don’t mind that right now. I am running into some problems though. Mostly I just don’t want to spend to much time on it if there is an easier way.

Has anybody done anything like this? Is there an easier way?

Regards,
-T

You can download Blender 2.41
and download the 2.41 demos:
http://download.blender.org/demo/test/gameengine_demos-2.41.zip

Then check out p2p2.blend (or the other physics demos)
Make sure you have ‘enable all frames’ switched on in the game menu.

There is some ragdoll demo here on Elysiun that shows how to break constraints.
Good luck,
Erwin