Working on Grid System not gridmap based for modular vehicles

Help Physics
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Godot Version

4.2.2

Question

Hi, I’m trying to create a modular vehicle system in Godot 4, similar to the one in Space Engineers. I’ve tried three different approaches, but each has its own set of problems.

Approach 1: Multiple Rigidbodies
I created a system where each block has its own Rigidbody, collision shape, and mesh. However, this approach performed poorly in multiplayer due to the large number of Rigidbodies.

Approach 2: Single Rigidbody with Multiple Collisions
I tried using a single Rigidbody with multiple collision shapes based on Area3D blocks. However, I encountered “phantom forces” that caused the structure to move erratically. I attempted to concatenate all the collisions into one, but was unsuccessful.

Approach 3: GridMap
I also experimented with using a GridMap, but it didn’t work well as a mobile child of a Rigidbody.

Can anyone offer advice on how to overcome these challenges or suggest an alternative approach?

2

You could look into greedymeshing the blocks to reduce the number of collisionshapes and meshes. Depending on how you want everything to work you could also try using occlusion culling/neighbor detection to cull any meshes/collisionshapes which are surrounded by other blocks and won’t collide with anything