This brushy patch is at the top corner of one of our fields. It’s a weird triangular low spot and when we moved here it was still open field but it stays too soft too much of the year to reliably mow safely. We refer to it as the Bermuda Triangle: “nah, it’s just superstition, seems a little soft but should be firm enough to mow” and then you too get the tractor stuck and it takes an hour or three to dig it out… So now it’s given over to whatever wants to grow there.
I should know what this tall thing with the pinkish flowers and maroon stems is but I can’t think of it right now. Not even sure if it’s native/naturalized or if it’s something planted. The wife in the family who owned the place since the 70s plunked stuff all over the place: there are random stands of purple irises and the occasional Turk’s-cap lily popping up the middle of some of the fields, and so on.
I have a couple programmer friends that meet weekly to talk gamedev and we usually have some little collaborative project going. A while ago we were talking about driving vehicles with trailers for some reason (oh, my friend was talking about getting a camper since he’s having to split his time between two different states) and I joked that there should be a video game that teaches you to back up trailers. Like those little Flash valet-parking games that there used to be a bunch of. Trailer Time! Heh.
So we’re supposed to start on that, and tonight I sat down and tossed together a little set of car-driving physics. It’s fun how simple it is to do wheels when you know how. Figure the velocity of the wheel, use the dot product to split it between the rolling direction and the sideways direction, apply a force proportional to the sideways slip. Cap that sideways force at a point if you want sliding/drifting mechanics. OK. I’m going to go try making a second (unpowered) vehicle and throw in a joint and see how it works as a trailer-sim.