Physics - Floating physboxes?

Normally a large (say 1000x500) physbox would crush you and be hard to
move, is there a way to make a physbox float? (Not a prop)

float? like make it weightless? if you mean something else you can hang it up on ropes or somehting...

or are you talking about taking its mass way down?

If you mean float as on water, make it's material type to "wood, small" and it should do it.

If you mean float in the air, I don't think you can make it do that
exactly, but you could try setting the Mass Scale to a very small
number (0.000001 or something). (You can't set it to 0, as that's the
same as setting it to 1).

a clip tex with the filter set to the name of the phys object :wink: .

I haven't tried it but perhaps you could use the "ragdoll on a rope" method but set the rope's Start Fade Distance to be 1 or something so it's there but you can't see it. Would make the object appear to be hanging in the air.

If you meant floating, I'm not sure but I did have the opposite problem where my rocks were floating on water even though the Prop Data was set to stone.medium.

If you want it to hover in the air, you can set the "Start Asleep" flag under the physbox flags tab. You can activate it with an input from a func_trigger placed beneath it if you wish it to crush a player that passes beneath it. I believe objects that start asleep will be activated by being shot as well, this is how the paintings in the source version of cs_office are handled.

You could also use the "Motion Disabled" flag, with a similar triggering method. The difference between motion disabled and start asleep is that objects with their motion disabled will never move until motion is enabled, unless you also set the "Enable Motion on Physcannon Grab" flag.

If you just want to make it very light, you could follow Rof's suggestion and give it a very small Mass Scale value.

I just put a thin layer of func_breakable glass under a large box i wanted to crush people and had it break when a player stepped through a trigger.

What I meant was something like a boat where if it had too much weight
or force applied it would sink, and it could be pushed and pulled
around by explosions or other things

I don't think it would be possible at this point to make a boat that would be dry inside, due to the way water is handled in the source engine. However, by making a physbox out of wood (again, this is as Rof suggested already) you can make it float on water. Just choose one of the wood options from the "Prop Data" property. I'm not sure if setting "Material Type" to wood will do the same thing, but it seems likely.

if you're after making a ship of some sort you'll have to pay attention to the hull shape, i made one the other day...tipped and all that shyt :sad: so i hunted down some pics on google n found a hull shape that worked, might acctually be common knowledge and i was bein thick as fook, but it works now, make the hull more rounded and wide, if you are making a ship, keep the polys down cos it lags, i'm working on making the actual ship a sort of funcbrush non clip model parented to a playerclip "simplified" physbox model of the ship cos atm its still a bit laggy, althought i've toned it down a bit by parenting funcbrush and telling it not to clip, and making playerclip boxes to block it off. ne ways it works i'll post a screenshot when i get back from college. ne ways look for some pics of hulls from galleons n stuff n model em on that, s'how i got my ship to work. also stairs are a ball ache to run up when ships swaying n tipping n stuff, best to make a playerclip wedge or somert n set the brush for the stairs as noclip n parent as needed sorta thing. ne ways soz if what i've wrotes all garbbled i'm kinda in a rush gotta get back to lecture :sad: