Created: April 23 2012

Revisiting the fake conveyor-belt tank


After spending a lot of time working on the upcoming R.U.B.E editor recently, I took a break and tried out the idea that I briefly mentioned in the topic about how fake conveyor belts could be rendered to make them appear moving. I added a bunch of textures to the same tank model from last year's original experiment, without changing any of the actual functionality that makes it move.

YouTube video:

The same surface tangent speed given to the track fixtures is used to move textures around a series of spline points and turn the wheel textures at the right speed. The points along the bottom are attached to the track segment bodies, and the points along the top are attached to a 'swing bridge' type chain which is has nothing to do with movement of the tank and is only there to calculate the points for rendering. The wheels are also only for show.

During my search for some textures to put on this I did notice that the front wheel is only a wheel and not a driving sprocket and I figured the military hardware afficionados out there might notify me of this grievous error. Rest assured the source code has been changed since the video so the downloads below have a regular roller wheel at the front :)

Source code: iforce2d-tank-textured-src.zip

Binaries: iforce2d-tank-textured-bin.zip (includes Linux, Windows, Mac)