Bring Newtonian forces out from behind the modesty curtain of "target speeds", "strengths", and "densities"
At times, Dreams' attitude to Newtonian forces can seem like Victorian England's apocryphal attitude to curvy table legs.
We know that Newtonian forces are in there somewhere - the physics simulation is consistent provided that you don't do anything too strange. Yet nowhere is there a place where I can type a number and that number is a Newtonian force - not even in the tweak menu of the gadget that calls itself a Force Applier.
Newtonian forces are kept hidden away behind the modesty curtain of "target speeds", "strengths", and "densities". The Newtonian force that a mover or a connector applies may be a function of those values, but the function cannot be reverse engineered because density, which is exposed to the logic network, isn't a real input to the function. The real input in place of density is mass, which is exposed to the player only, and not to the logic network.
So if I want to tell a gadget that the force it applies is 100N, I'm out of luck - it can't be done.
It would be useful if gadgets that apply forces to objects had an alternative set of tweaks in which the Newtonian force that they apply can be specified directly.
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I would see it as a button in physics gadgets to either make it newtonian or velocity based. I agree.
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I totally agree, from an education point of view this could be really useful if you wanted to teach mechanics/Newton’s laws in dreams itself
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