Research: exhaustive Nimso Project TX study (82 video transcripts) + Boneworks/BIMOS rig reference

- research/nimso-project-tx.md: chronological per-video notes 2017-2026, topic synthesis,
  VR Messs scope, proportions & calibration (Winter/Drillis-Contini/Dempster tables verified),
  open unknowns
- research/sources/nimso-transcripts/: yt-dlp auto-caption transcripts + dated index (re-pullable)
- research/vr-physics-rig-hexabody.md: BIMOS/HexaBody/Boneworks reference, Box3D native joint
  mapping (spherical/motor/prismatic/distance), superseded-as-target note
- AGENTS/HANDOFF research pointers

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

research/sources/nimso-transcripts/TOmVCvpq5QM.txt

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+# How It Works 2 B - Half Life : Alyx - Physics Design! (TOmVCvpq5QM, 1682s)
+
+it's me name sony welcome back to vr we are back in the how it works series this is episode 2 part two and um today we are looking once again on uh grab objects we're gonna ignore everything in this little area here for now and hop over to another special place where we can shoot something yes we have guns in this video and we also have the gravity gloves yay um now we're gonna continue on from the last video so if you haven't had a look at the last video yet uh have a look at that first uh because that one describes a few things that we're going to base some of the changes off here as well so let's have a look very quickly let's get over to where i want to go now one thing very quickly i i did notice is if we just push our hands through here you can see that uh there is no uh no enemy over here or anything there's no head crab or anything there's just that that dude over there which is of course unusual since if we open this door over here and pop back up here you can see nothing there even if we pop our head into there nothing there however now we uh suddenly have this dude so yeah you can see exactly when that loading point happens it actually happens right as you come around the corner he gets loaded in so that way you don't have a chance to actually see him accidentally when you pop through here now before we start we're going to take this guy and drop him over there so we don't have to look at his ugly face um let's start with something that we actually mentioned in the last video uh but before i do that i'm gonna grab that thing and put it in this pocket that's quite important we'll have a look at that very soon uh but right now guns how do guns work well in the last video i mentioned and showed how when you hold a physics object or when you're not holding a physics object and you're moving uh your hand does this intelligent thing where it traces from your head to the uh objects in front of you and persistence itself there it doesn't apply to physics objects so as a result physics objects don't end up on the front of the object that you're hitting and they just have you they have actual physics that sort of forces them to get to get delayed and pushed about that however doesn't happen on guns you can see here obviously this is what a gun would do if you pushed it into a wall however when i'm moving with the fake movement you can see it doesn't actually do that it does what the hand does so how is that happening well it's uh it's very simple really that is not a separate physics object that is the hand that's uh kind of the simple way that i would do it anyway uh now once again disclaimer i don't know any of the actual behind the scenes of any of these uh any of these things i just uh study games pretty pretty much from the moment i start playing them and uh that's how i kind of judge what i believe is happening most of the time right so yeah what's happening here is this is basically just replacing your hand when you're holding a gun your hand can't really do anything other than hold the gun at that point so it's not able to do any of the gravity glove stuff as you can see nothing with this hand here not with this hand right and they also of course can't grab things so here using my grip you can hear it in my hand absolutely does not grab objects so all they do basically is just change the shape of your actual physics hand remember the physics hand isn't the one that you're seeing right because if i'm holding something and then i can i i sort of stop that thing there uh that's not very useful to do it there um not that one of those boxes once again right remember if i'm holding something like this i still have a physics hand which is completely separate which allows me to push things about right so that visual hand is not what you're actually it's not where the actual physics is and the same thing applies here and in fact this is actually a little bit offset from where the hand really is in reality i don't know whether you can see if i yeah you can see it if i pause the game as well so here we go i need to keep moving my headset down i keep forgetting that the camera on screen is a little bit stupidly positioned uh but yeah there we go so when we pause the game you can see that my actual hand is not in the right place and you can actually see that from something else as well here when i hold my uh my teleport line you can see it comes from the center of my palm here in between these two fingers right comes from the center of my palm there we go but when i have a gun out you can see that the teleport line no longer comes from the center of my palm but rather a sort of lower area right and that's just it's just an offset entirely designed for the gun to be positioned in what feels comfortable you'll notice that's actually a very common theme here with what we're talking about today which is how the game decides how to deal with physics objects it's very important to understand that a lot of 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