Rope Tool Reference

Ropes can be used to attach objects together or to hang objects from. They react to objects around them, but will not affect those objects.

Using the Rope Tool

The rope tool can be found under RollUpBar> Objects > Misc.

Turn on follow terrain and snap to objects. Place the rope by using the left mouse button. This works in a similar way as placing a road.

A rope can be edited using the edit rope button in its properties. You can move points in the normal way, add points by ctrl-clicking and remove them by double clicking.

When in edit rope mode, you will notice that a point can be colored green or red. Green means the rope is validly attached, and red means the rope is not attached to anything.

Attached

NOT Attached

Dynamic Tessellation / Subdivide

As of recently, there are two rope simulation modes, with dynamic tessellation on and off. Without dynamic tessellation rope, segments are asset-based and are simulated as rigid sticks. In this mode the rope cannot properly collide with objects when it's tied with both ends and strained. With dynamic tessellation the rope has SegCount segments (independently of the actual rope asset), and each of them can have a maximum of SubVtxCount internal vertices, created at collision points. More segments make the rope less likely to tunnel through thin objects, but increase the simulation cost. Refer to the art documentation on how to author rope assets for these two modes

Properties

Rope Params

Smooth	Defines if the rope will be smoothed out or not
Num Segments	The number of segments of geometry used to in the rope along its length
Num Sides	The number of sides around the circumference of the rope
Texture U Tiling	Texture stretching in the U direction
Texture V Tiling	Texture stretching in the V direction
Bind Ends Radius	Specifies whether the ends will be automatically attached
Bind Radius	The environment around the ends of the rope will be tested using a box of this radius to find places for the rope to attached to

Physics Params

Max Subdiv Verts	Maximum number of subdivided vertices per segment
Physical Segments	number of rope segments in physics (can be different from the number of segments used for rendering)
Mass	This affects how strongly the rope will react to bullet hits. When interacting with solid physicalized objects, it is always treated as weightless
Tension	specifies tension in the original state. A positive value will cause the rope ends to pull together, negative will add slack to the rope (-0.02 is a good starting point for experiments)
Friction	The friction effective in a non-strained mode. In a strained mode with dynamic tesselation, this that prevents the rope from slipping until it tilts too much
Friction Pull	How strongly the rope opposes movement in its pull direction (when strained with dynamic tesslation). Keep this value either small enough (0.1-0.3) to get some resistance, or large enough (5-10-100+) to make sure the rope sticks firmly in most cases. Intermediate values can lead to unstable behaviour when the object the rope rubs against (ex. a pulley) is light enough compared to the objects it is tied to
Wind x, y, z	Simulated wind, additional to any area-specific winds around
Wind Variance	How much the wind varies
Air Resistance	must be set in order for wind to take effect
Water Resistance	How the rope interacts with water effectively damping when under water
Max Force	the rope will detach itself when this strain limit is breached
Check Collisions	Will the rope have collision with other obejcts/bullets
Ignore Attachment Collisions	Makes the rope ignore collisions with the object it is attached to

Other Road Tool Parameters

Click here for the Miscellaneous Parameters reference guide, here for the Miscellaneous Entity Parameters guide, here for the Entity Links guide and here for the Entity Events guide.

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