Physics and the Matrix Revisited

Physics has been a harsh mistress for me. I always seem to repeat the pattern of progressing very fast then hitting a roadblock so hard that my nose comes out my...well you get it. I spent the last several days fighting my mass-spring system for my blob. I tried several things and was becoming increasingly frustrated. I finally stumbled upon a post at GameDev and took found one fellow programmer as frustrated as myself. He got a lot of good advice which included stepping back and breaking the problem down into small demos. I needed to do this so I took some deep breaths and wrote several small pieces. Starting with just two point masses using verlet integration, I started messing with apply forces. I eventually came upon something that never fully dawned on me before: Forces are constant! This is incredibly obvious to anyone who has dabbled in basics of physics, but I didn't quite realize how important that concept is. The way I was implementing, sources of forces can lumping up every iteration. So my springs were adding their force every frame to my points. Each spring generates ONE force that is changed every frame (not added!). Egads! So much to re understand! So many doors opened!

Now for the second part of my post. I recently acquired the score to Matrix Revolutions and I have to say its way better then the movie. Thats a shame.