Animated platform using OgreNewt

I am creating a 3d platform game using Ogre, OgreNewt and Maya as my 3D tool. As my game is made up of lots of small levels, I have made it so level construction is done completely in Maya. Currently I use the LFA scene manager to export the level to a .scene XML file and then when I load it I look for special flags in this file to set up the physics bodies for nodes that need them. This means I don't need any level-specific loading code.

This method is working well, but now I would like to have solid platforms in my levels that move on a predefined path, that my character can stand on. Again, I want to define this behaviour completely from within Maya.

I have discovered one method whereby I create a simple motion path animation in Maya and then use the native Ogre exporter to create a .anim file based on node positions at certain times.Then I will be able to parse this file and create Ogre Animation classes based on the contents.

However, am I right in saying that I can not animate objects like this if they have physics bodies attached to them? I guess this is the case because if the Ogre SceneNode is moved then the OgreNewt body will not know about this. Therefore do I need to apply forces to the bodies to animate them instead?

If that is the case then it's surely going to be a real pain to have any sort of complex path that the platform moves along!

Any suggestions will be much appreciated!

Cheers

my first thought is if you could transfrom the animation from maya

to a xml file or something where it tells coordinates where the platform is

like a path, then in ogrenewt set velocity to body like

(targetPos - currentPos) / time to move there

and when currentPos = targetPos -> new targetPos read from file and so on

Managed to get my moving platforms up and running using the set velocity technique, but whenever my character moved onto the platform the platform would fall away.

From some research I found that I would need to use a UpVector joint to stop the platform rotating and a Slider joint to restrict movement to one direction. My problem is that my platforms will be moving between nodes on a path, and so each time a new node is reached the direction of the Slider joint has to be changed, so that the platform can move in a different direction. I could not find a method to change a Slider joint's direction, so I thought the only way was to destroy the current joint and create a new one, when the platform was to change direction.

e.g.

if (movement_joint != NULL)
delete movement_joint;
movement_joint = new OgreNewt::BasicJoints::Slider(body->getWorld(), body, NULL, pos, new_direction);


However, the platform does not move after this, probably because the original slider joint's contraints are still acting on it.

I notice Newton has a NewtonDestroyJoint function. Is the method I am using the correct way to destroy the joint using OgreNewt? Or is there a way to modify a slider joint's direction without destroying it?

Many thanks