Tutorial

Building a car

This tutorial should take just a few minutes, and at the end of it you will have a working, if very simple, vehicle.

Making a Box

When the game starts up, you should see a grey rectangle in the middle of the screen. Move your mouse over to the left hand side of the screen, and a toolbar should pop out. This is where you will find all the objects that you can create. For now, look at the blue ones - these are the simple shapes, like spheres and boxes. Click on the button in the toolbar to create a box, and you should see a small grey box appear in the middle of the screen, just above the floor. Lets zoom in to get a closer look. If you're mouse has a scroll wheel, you can use that, otherwise, hold down the 'Q' key on your keyboard and drag your mouse down, slowly! If you zoom in too far and get lost, press the 'F' key to go back to your starting view.

Click on the box with your mouse, and dont let go. It should turn green, and you'll see a little white disc with spots appear around it. If you move the mouse around, the box should follow you now. The white disc is the plane that you can move the box on - forwards and backwards, and side to side. (We'll discuss moving upwards later). For now, drag the box to the left a little. You should see the box hop from spot to spot, instead of moving slowly. If the box moves smoothly instead, then look to the bottom right hand corner of the screen and press the 'snap' button. This will make it much easier to keep everything lined up and symmetrical.

Moving and Stretching the Box

Now lets stretch the box out to make it longer. Its going to be the body of the car. Find the button near the top of the toolbar (if you don't see the toolbar, move your mouse to the left of the screen and it should appear). Press it once to turn on control point mode - now whenever you select an object, it will be surrounded with white spheres that you can drag around to change things. Select the box, and then select the right most control point, and drag it to the right until the box is about 4 times as wide as used to be. Once you are done, head back to the toolbar, and press the control point button again to turn off control points.

For future reference, instead of toggling control points on from the tool box, you can just hold down the 'Alt' key ('Option' on Macs).

Adding Motors, and How to Rotate Things

In the tool bar, look at the red icons. The red icons are joints and motors. This includes axles, hinges, hydraulics, and ball-and-socket joints. Click on the button to create an axle (rotational joint) in the middle of the screen. Were going to attach 4 of these to the box. However, we have to rotate them first. Go over to the toolbox and press the button once to toggle on rotation. Now click and hold the mouse on the motor. A white disc with (different) dots should appear around the motor. By dragging the mouse around the motor you can rotate it in the plane of that disc. Because snap mode is on, the motor will snap cleanly to 15 degree increments. Rotate the motor around until the small axle is facing towards you, perpendicular to the box. Make sure the angle is exact, so that the car will go forwards nicely. Note that you can go into rotation mode by holding down the shift key, if that feels more natural to you.

Go back to the toolbar and turn off rotation mode, and then drag the motor over to the front of the box so that the big haf of it intersects the box. When objects intersect, they will be attached together in physics mode. Make sure that the small axle of the joint does not touch the box - this way, it will be able to rotate freely.

Copying Things, and Rotating the Camera

Copying objects is easy, but also a little different than you might be used to. Whenver you have a part of your machine selected, you can copy it by pressing the 'C' key. As soon as you do that, a copy will be produced at exactly the same position as the original object. Note that you dont have to press the paste key.

So, select the motor, press 'C', and then drag it over to the left side of your box. Now you should have two motors, facing the same way, one at the front and one at the back of the box.

Now's a good time to go over the camera controls, so you can get a better view of the other half of your car. If you hold down the right mouse key and drag the mouse around, your camera will rotate around. Try it (slowly!) so that you can see the other side of your car easily. If you left click and drag (without selecting any objects, so click on the floor or on the background) then you'll pan the camera around.

Copy one of the two motors and drag it to the other side of your car. Select the motor and rotate it around backwards, so that it is a mirror image of the first motor. Copy this new rotated motor and move it over sideways so that your car has four, evenly spaced motors.

Adding Wheels

Now were going to make some wheels to attach to the motors. This is going to be mostly the same as adding the motors. Move over to the toolbar and press the cylinder button. A cylinder should appear in the middle of the screen. Just like with the motor, you're going to rotate it around 90 degrees. Go into control point mode and select the cylinder. Drag the top sphere upwards one grid position to make the wheel wider. Now move the wheel into position so that the little axle of the motor goes right through the center of the wheel. You want to make sure that the small axle of the motor is intersecting the wheel, but you also want to make sure that the wheel doesn't touch the body of the car, or the large half of the motor. This way, the wheel will be free to rotate around the motor.

As before, make three copies of the wheel and drag them into symmetric positions around the car, so that each motor has a wheel.

Powering the Motors, and Deleting Things

So far we've created a nice car (ok, maybe an ugly car) with four wheels, four motors, and a box. But its not very interesting yet, because all the motors are unpowered! Unpowered motors will let objects rotate around them freely, but they won't do any work on their own.

Go over to the toolbar and press the button to create a battery. You should see most things suddenly become a transparent blue (kind of like a blueprint), and you should see a simple grey 'battery' in the middle. In Golems, there are two kinds of objects - physical objects, like joints and boxes, that are 'solid' in the sense that they can bounce into each other when physics is turned on. But there are also 'functional' objects, things like batteries, which aren't really there at all when physics runs. They are also usually invisible when you are designing your machine. Functional objects control how the physical objects act - they turn on or off motors, for example - but they don't interact with physics themselves. They are kind of like ghosts, or like your machine's brain.

Functional objects connect to each other with wires. When seen in functional 'blue print' view, each motor has two ports that these wires can attach to - a green input port, and a yellow output port. Wires attached to the input port control how fast the motor goes, and wires attached to the output port will transmit information about the motor, such as how fast it is going.

To create a wire, click on the yellow output port on top of the battery (it's a small flat disc), and drag the mouse away a bit. You should see a yellow wire with a white sphere at the end where your mouse is. If you let go, the wire will disappear, unless the white sphere at the end is over an input port (the bright green parts). Drag a wire from the top of the battery to the middle of the front right motor. If you've done this correctly, then when you let go of the wire, it should remain, attaching the battery to the motor. Now this motor is powered!

If you need to delete a wire, select it (it will become bright green) and press the 'delete' key. In fact, if you need to delete anything, select it and press 'delete'.

You should create another wire from the battery to the front motor on the left, so that it will be powered, but there's a problem: If you power both motors the same way, they will both turn counter-clockwise, and the car will spin in circles. So were going to make the second wire a negative wire. It will take the signal from the battery, and invert it so that it sends the opposite message to the motor. Click on the top of the battery like before, and drag the wire off, but don't connect it to the motor yet. Without letting go of the wire, press and hold the 'Alt' key ('Option' on Macs). As long as you are holding down the 'Alt' key, the wire should be bright red. Now drag the wire over to the green input inside the motor on the left, and (still holding down 'Alt' so that it is red) attach the wire to the motor.

You could power the other two motors at the back of the car if you like, but for now let's exit functional view. On the toolbar, click the selection button, and the view will go back to design mode. If you want to return to functional view, press the wire view button.

Making it Go!

Ok! Let's make the car go. In the top right hand corner of the screen is a small sphere, . When you bring the mouse over it, it will look like .

Press it!

If you've done everything right, you should see the car accelerate forward (or backward if you crossed the wires).

Now you should have a very simple, but functional car. Why don't you test it out a bit? Give it some obstacles to driver over, or switch the wheels out for spheres. Maybe give it a nosecone and a rocket booster...

There is much, much more that Golems can do. Explore!