Attaching Dynamic Cord to Pawn?

[brotherbartholomew]

Hey all, great to finally be part of this community (first post!); I was hoping you can help me sort this problem out. I am currently working on a Megaman-style sidescroller featuring a Robot character (extends Pawn) that will ideally have a pair of dynamic cords emerging from his back (PhysicsAssets). Unfortunately the method I am trying has resulted in really bizarre errors.

Here is the setup: http://yfrog.com/f/7fdynamiccordrobotj/

Basically I am trying to attach the cord to the Robot via an RB_BSJointActor, but upon debugging, the cord disappears and occasionally flashes across the screen as a tangled mess. This has lead me to believe either:

1) RB_BSJointActors are static (or not suitable to be movers)
2) The physics collision on my cord is terribly flawed
3) This sort of thing is simply not possible in UDK
(Also, I naively tried using basic Kismet and Actor Property attachments, but obviously attempts failed)

Please let me know if you have any ideas/suggestions; getting this to work would save me A LOT of painful animation work

Thanks Friends,
Brother B

[danimal']

Don't take my word as gospel, but when I tried several months ago, I could not get the pawn class to play nicely with constraints. Theoretically you should be able to, but even when I got it marginally working, five new "issues" would pop up.

I'd really recommend doing it Whizzle style, they made a custom character, not based on Pawn, but based on KActors which are intrinsically designed to work with constraints. Which also leads me to my belief that pawns + constraints just aren't friendly, because it seems like the Whizzle crew would have just done this if it was easy. If you really wanna explore it, check out the Hoverboard, where, in theory, a Pawn is attached via contraints (though frankly some of it is native).

[brotherbartholomew]

Thanks for the response; I'm pretty much dropping the idea of attaching directly to pawn and figuring I'll try attaching to a mover instead (and attach the mover to the pawn). Seems to be work (see image below) until the pawn moves sporadically, then the cord goes berserk (see image below image). Based upon my robot controller class, which causes instantaneous rotation of the pawn in the XZ-plane when switching direction, I'm pretty sure this will be unavoidable. Looks like I'm going to be animating those cords after all...:( Unless there is a way to toggle physics simulations, is there??


http://img443.imageshack.us/img443/4061/robotwithcord.jpg (http://img443.imageshack.us/i/robotwithcord.jpg/)

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http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/3740/robotwithcordsuck.jpg (http://img291.imageshack.us/i/robotwithcordsuck.jpg/)

Uploaded with ImageShack.us (http://imageshack.us)

[danimal']

Yah indirectly "connecting" the pawn won't work. I tried it several ways, including via how the physics gun handles stuff (RB_Handle). I think a very, very capable unrealscript programmer could walk through the hoverboard and something like feign death (where pawn is set to rigid body) and maybe get it to work, but I consistently got very odd behavior. At one point I successfully got pawn into rigidbody, then had him swing - sort of.

What exactly do you want these ropes to do? Unless you want them to actually do something physical, it's best to just fake it in the sense of still using constraints and dynamic ropes, but "fake" what you want to have happen to the pawn (e.g., sit there suspended in the air).