Unable to find good parameters for behavior of a puck in Farseer

Question

EDIT:

I have tried all kinds of variations now. The last one was to adjust the linear velocity in each step: newVel = oldVel * 0.9f - all of this including your proposals kind of work, however in the end if the velocity is little enough, the puck sticks to the wall and slides either vertically or horizontally. I can't get rid of this behavior. I want it to bounce, no matter how slow it is. Retitution is 1 for all objects, Friction is 0 for all. There is no gravity. What am I possibly doing wrong?

In my battle to learn and understand Farseer I'm trying to setup a simple Air Hockey like table with a puck on it. The table's border body is made up from:

    Vertices aBorders = new Vertices( 4 );
    aBorders.Add( new Vector2( -fHalfWidth, fHalfHeight ) );
    aBorders.Add( new Vector2( fHalfWidth, fHalfHeight ) );
    aBorders.Add( new Vector2( fHalfWidth, -fHalfHeight ) );
    aBorders.Add( new Vector2( -fHalfWidth, -fHalfHeight ) );

    FixtureFactory.AttachLoopShape( aBorders, this );
    this.CollisionCategories = Category.All;
this.CollidesWith = Category.All;
this.Position = Vector2.Zero;
this.Restitution = 1f;
this.Friction = 0f;

The puck body is defined with:

FixtureFactory.AttachCircle( DIAMETER_PHYSIC_UNITS / 2f, 0.5f, this );
this.Restitution = 0.1f;
this.Friction = 0.5f;
this.BodyType = FarseerPhysics.Dynamics.BodyType.Dynamic;
this.LinearDamping = 0.5f;
this.Mass = 0.2f;

I'm applying a linear force to the puck:

this.oPuck.ApplyLinearImpulse( new Vector2( 1f, 1f ) );

The problem is that the puck and the walls appear to be sticky. This means that the puck's velocity drops to zero to quickly below a certain velocity. The puck gets reflected by the walls a couple of times and then just sticks to the left wall and continues sliding downwards the left wall. This looks very unrealistic.

What I'm really looking for is that a puck-wall-collision does slow down the puck only a tiny little bit. After tweaking all values left and right I was wondering if I'm doing something wrong. Maybe some expert can comment on the parameters?

Answer 1

The solution was finally found in the Box2D forum. The negine has a velocity threshold. If velocity drops below that it is set to 0. The default value is 1.0. I changed it to 0.1 and voilà it behaves correct, even when using linear damping.

The constant is defined in FarseerPhysics.Settings.VelocityThreshold

Answer 2

You need to raise your restitution value, to stop the puck from sticking. The restitution value determines the "bounciness" of your puck when it hits the wall.

A Restitution value of 1 meaning a perfect elastic collision.

Whereas, a value of 0 would mean a perfect in-elastic collision (Doesn't bounce at all).

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_restitution

Answer 3

The Farseer Physics Engine is an extension of Box.2D and as such you can use the extensive documentation available for Box.2D most usefull of which is the manual.

Damping is used to reduce the world velocity of bodies. Damping is different than friction because friction only occurs with contact. Damping is not a replacement for friction and the two effects should be used together.

Personally I keep my damping pretty high as I'm simulating characters via hit boxes and I don't want my people to bounce. However, in you case I believe the dampening setting is high enough to cause the issue you describe.

Try setting the damping to something along the suggest lines of around a tenth.

Damping parameters should be between 0 and infinity, with 0 meaning no damping, and infinity meaning full damping. Normally you will use a damping value between 0 and 0.1. I generally do not use linear damping because it makes bodies look floaty.