Physics bridge collapse

Physics bridge collapse 2,
originally uploaded by Ordinal Malaprop.

As an quick experiment I tried to build a bridge over the stream on my land that was supported purely physically. The only non-physical elements were the two top bars you can see in the pictures, and the top rings connected to them - apart from that, each individual ring was a separate object, and the bridge itself the four rings at its corners was as well.

It didn't work very well. As soon as I enabled physics on the objects concerned, it started to behave a bit oddly. Two corners of the bridge began to swing downwards. The sim began to run like treacle. And then the whole thing began to break apart, very slowly, with rings passing through each other and shooting off in a rather interesting but utterly unproductive way.

At the end of it I was left with the base bridge board half through the stream bank, with the departing links scattered across my land. Though I don't have much land, so it wasn't hard to track them down and delete them.

I suspect that non-physical objects may be the way to go in future, but I'm determined to get something interesting working on a permanent basis. Earlier on I built a small installation with similar links chaining a scripted physical "creature" to a post, which constantly tried to get away. A similar thing happened there, with breaking chains. Perhaps SL was just concerned about cruelty to scripts.