Armadillo Run forum

There are all types of machines that use all sorts of stuff to move around, but has anyone ever made one that moves using something similar to legs?

The materials in Armadillo Run are simply too fragile for anything fast or useful. There are toys though that may work. I shall get back to you.

See the Matacus #5 entries

None of them really worked too well; I suspect the few that did were simply vibrating their way down unnoticably gentle slopes.

you would also need a way to make connectors act like muscles for proper leg movement, and like NeXFerret said, the materials are just too flimsy. Also, we can't make a metal bar into one long single column and not a chain, which is kind of neccesary in order to make proper legs.

smjjames wrote:we can't make a metal bar into one long single column and not a chain

Yes we can!

You can make long metal bars with AREdit, a program that can make
extra long (basically infinite) metal, rubber and rocket pieces,
allows you to put nodes in exact places (by coordinates),
have tension greater than +/-100%,
huge (infinite?) level boundaries,
multiple armadillos (and portals, one portal per dillo),
different sized armadillos,
timers over 60 seconds
materials outside of level boundaries (?)

and other things which I cannot recall at the moment.

Basically it's awesome for cool (hacked) levels. It has been used many times in contests.

What was my point again?

Oh yeah. You can do that, but it also gets rid of points on the "leg" to put your "muscles" if you don't want to put them on the very end of everything.

that stuff sounds cool, although I probably should practice making stuff with the standard setup first before taking on the more advanced mods as I did get the full game a couple days ago and I'm still figuring some things out. Like that force thing, one form of which I did stumble onto on my own. I don't know what you guys call it here, but I did use it on the level 17 catapult that I uploaded to the thread of the same name (of the level) on the built in levels forum.

Anyways, what I meant about muscles would be something that has the ability to contract and expand, or rather contract repeatedly since real muscles can only contract. The tension would act as the same type of force, but I don't know if its possible to have a rope or elastic (would make more sense with elastic though) contract (high tension), release, then contract again with AR's physics engine. However you guys have made some cool sounding mods already, so maybe some kind of mod to the physics engine could achieve this.

The mods are only for the level data, which has nothing to do with the physics engines. (The editing program affect change the .exe), so you couldn't do that. You can do similar things with the force and cam like thingies though.

I had a crack at this for matacus 5, but never managed to get it to work. My idea was to use pistons and hinges instead of muscles - there are plenty of piston designs out there. The problem with that is you need slow, steady movement which can work against serious resistance without breaking.

I ended up building a huge, heavy flywheel to keep the motion slow and even, which did work nicely, but then to make something mobile and able to walk, you can't hang this big, heavy wheel off of a fixed node - it's all got to be supported by the legs...sigh

So, long story short, it's really hard, if not yet proven impossible. Maybe if we had 'carbon fibre' in our materials list...

yea, having something like carbon fibre would be a cool addition, would have to be expensive though to prevent overuse in contests and levels.

As would springs - rubber, only in the metal bars layer.

its impossible because the legs would have to overlap and that cant be done

Voltrillian wrote:its impossible because the legs would have to overlap and that cant be done

No, one leg could be made of metal bars, the other out of metal sheets. As long as the surface it is walking on has both then it'd work.

Or, you could have a multi-legged creature, see attached. It walks in so much that its body doesn't touch the floor.

TECHNICALLY and SCIENTIFICALLY... that octopus isnt walikng, its rotating... wiki search "walking" if u disagree