What constitutes 'interpenetration'?

Relax - it's not a sexgen question!

I've been experimenting with possibly making some of my walls physical to see whether it would stop particles invading the build. They are flush in contact but not overlapping with each other, any other objects or the ground but the setting is disallowed on the grounds that this cannot be done with parts which 'interpenetrate' other objects.

Does this effectively mean that there must be a clear space to be made physical? Obviously not good for walls.

I think what you are attempting is impossible.

A "physical" prim has a 'collision box' around it thet will keep it a small distance apart from other prims. You can't eliminate that gap, so it isn't possible to seamlesly mesh some physical prims with others that are not physical. And as far as I know, a physical prim doesn't stop particles, anyway.

The physical boundaries of an object are always .05M bigger in every direction than the object itself. Usually though, if two objects are touching and you turn on physics, they'll simply spring apart. If it says they're interpenetrating, you've probably got at lest one object sticking through another somewhere, or sticking through the ground somewhere.

In any case, physics won't stop particles. All it will do is cause your walls to fall down since they'll be affected by gravity and by people/objects bumping into them.

Oh but it is so much fun to watch the house explode! (make a copy first)

A

LOL hasn't done it so far. Sounds like a fun build though. "Slawkenbergius Slade is at the door" -> house collapses in a heap. Wonder if I can get someone to script that for me?

Definitely no overlap / interpenetration so I can only assume that the 0.5m is causing an effective overlap etc.

Didn't really expect it to work tbh, just experimenting. Thanks anyway.

Your house IS physical whether you set it that way or not. The physics engine does collision detection on anything that is not phantom. This is why you walk into a wall, and you stop moving forward -- it's all a function of the physics engine.

Particle effects meanwhile, are non-physical. They do not do collision detection and will happily fly all the way across a sim through anything in their path. You cannot keep out stray particle effects, other than asking the owner to stop doing it.

The other option is setting the number of visible particles in your client display settings to zero, so that you don't see particle effects at all. Though of course this breaks all your own particle effects.

Doh! Obvious really. I was confusing the way objects set to physical interact with AVs & each other (ie moving on contact) as being the opposite to non-physical.



It's my particles unfortunately. I was trying to stop the rain coming in

I want to stop it too, this post is from 2007, has anything been worked out for this?

Unfortunately no. However, having rainfall or snowfall on your parcel as I had back at New Year will involve placement of a number of particle emitters to achieve the effect. I carefully arranged them to finish dropping snow just outside my walls and set the emitters just high enough over my house to allow for the particle effect to die as it fell to the roof. It is a tedious business to set the things up but it pretty much works so long as the particle effect doesn't have PSYS_PART_WIND_MASK, in which case you might as well be living in a leaky tent on the moors.

Hi Ephraim,

It does sound a like a lot of effort, I'll still try that though and see if I can link them up so I can take down and put up easily...I just want to use it occasionally.

I only own a smallish plot of land and think it would look to weird for neighbors to have a perm square area of rain in their view, lol.

Thanks very much for the help.