Update

Hello everyone. It's been another while.

Last time I mentioned I was working on a new higgs grab and some weapon collision stuff. I did re-implement the higgs grab in a more proper way that actually respects the weight of the object you're grabbing and puts a limit on how much forge you can exert on something. It also properly acts as a pivot point where you grab it, which is what I really wanted in order to make it work fine with long objects such as when you would grab an enemy's weapon that they're holding, which I've mentioned before.
It's not perfect. Some objects, especially more complex ones, kind of freak out when you try too hard to push them into other things like into a table. This seems to be more of a problem the higher your max grab force, so perhaps something could be done here where the max force is variable if you're colliding with something, but I haven't tried anything yet.
I'm not that happy with the interaction with live ragdolls either, especially the framerate-dependence. I ended up using different max forces for different framerates, and I really kind of hate having to do something like that. I think the reason for this is that the planck ragdoll driving is actually mostly done through direct velocity application (kind of like the old higgs grab worked) instead of constraints/forces. But I've tried to get it to work mostly with driven constraints and it just doesn't yield good enough results that way, so it may just not be possible to address this nicely at the moment.

I took some time to create an in-game collision viewer. This is something that would have been super useful to me in the past, but it was always a bunch of work that I didn't want to have to stop whatever else I was doing to do instead.
I was tinkering around in some of the game's rendering code though, and I finally decided to do it, and it's pretty awesome. I'm really not sure how useful it will be for anyone other than me, but for me I basically can't test without it now.

Using the collision viewer, I've actually noticed several cases of ragdolls not actually lining up with their character animation.
For example, the initial "fix" I made for the frost atronach where it used to be floating, by adjusting constraint pivots, didn't actually really fix it. It does make it not float, but it makes its ragdoll much less aligned with its actual body. I couldn't see that before, but it's clear as day now.
I tracked some of these cases down to there being a restriction on bone lengths where even if the ragdoll bones move relative to each other (rather than just rotate), their distance from each other is restricted to always be the same. I did some brief testing and removing this restriction does basically fix this. I've yet to test if this has adverse effects though.
For the frost atronach, there are also other issues related to a specific type of rigidbody that the game seems to hardly ever handle properly (I've had to even edit the game to handle them properly in the past), which is the real reason why it's floating.
Anyways, I'll be focusing on this for a little while. Now that I can see this stuff clearly, it's really bugging me... and having this stuff properly aligned is really important since it's used for hit detection.

Then I'll go back to the weapon collision stuff. I hit a bit of a snag with this with a random crash similar to the memory corruption bug that existed in planck in the past which is super hard to track down and a bit demotivating.

Hopefully a fresh mind will help push that stuff forward again once I get back to it.