Actionscript 2D Physics Engine : pEngine

In response to my review of the available Actionscript 2D Physics Engines I received a comment from the YAAB (Yet Another Actionscript Blog) regarding a 2D Physics Engine they are working on called pEngine. This engine is a port of the Chipmunk engine from C. At the moment there are some interesting looking demos and not much else. But if you are interested in Flash physics it may be worthwhile bookmarking the YAAB feed.

Box2DFlashAS3 : Detecting Jack-in-the-Box Collisions

In my last post we started looking at the basics of using Box2DFlashAS3. We saw that you needed to listen for enterFrame events and use this event to update the position of the Sprites representing your Physics Bodies. This post I want to consider how you'd deal with special cases. For example, when you have a Body that needs to respond to a collision in a unique way. Imagine a ball falling onto a Jack-in-the-Box and triggering the box to spring open. The ball will be thrown up and to one side. This sort of response can't be represented by manipulating the elasticity of the two Bodies. The question is how would you detect and respond to the ball colliding with these bodies.

Our Jack-in-the-Box simulation has one special object: the ball. We want to take action when the ball collides with a special object (i.e the Jack-in-the-Box). The ball is a standard b2Body and it maintains a list of what it is in contact with. You can access this list using ball.GetContactList() to return a b2ContactNode. The first body in the list can be accessed using b2ContactNode's "other" property (I assume you can move through the list of contacts using "next" and "prev" but I haven't needed to test this yet). You can then check if this is a b2Body that needs a response. For example, if we have a b2Body called jack we could check if it is in contact with our ball like this :

var c_ball:b2ContactNode = this.ball.GetContactList();
var o_contact:b2Body = c_ball.other;

if(this.jack == o_contact)
{
var vec:b2Vec2 = new b2Vec2(200,-400);
this.ball.SetLinearVelocity(vec);
}

In this example, we test if the body in contact with the ball is jack. If true we set a new force that moves the ball up and to the right. In my simulation it is unlikely that the ball will collide with multiple special objects at the same time. So I'm happy to assume that there will only be one body in the contact list. If your ball will be in contact with multiple bodies you will want to check all bodies in the contact list.

Box2DFlashAS3 : Getting Started

The last couple of weeks I've been trialling and reviewing the available Actionscript 2D Physics Engines. The outcome of all this research is that I've settled on Box2DFlashAS3 (referred to as Box2D for the rest of this post) as the most mature of the available engines. Today I'd thought it best to give an overview of the basics that are required to start developing with Box2D. The basic steps are :

• define the b2AABB and it's boundaries
• define a gravity vector
• create the world and pass it the AABB and gravity objects
• create bodies and add them to your world (not covered here)
• create an enter frame event listener for updating your world

Thats the overview so let's take a look at the details. The code below is pretty much how it appears in the sample files but it's straight forward enough not to need changing :

//from your Classes constructor
// Create the world AABB
var worldAABB:b2AABB = new b2AABB();
worldAABB.minVertex.Set(-1000.0, -1000.0);
worldAABB.maxVertex.Set(1000.0, 1000.0);

// Define the gravity vector
var gravity:b2Vec2 = new b2Vec2(0.0,800.0);

You'll find yourself using the b2Vec2 Class a lot. Essentially whenever we define a force for the world or for a body or set the position of a body b2Vec2 will be a required parameter. It essentially has "x" and "y" properties which are either used as a force for that axis or a position for a body based on context. In this case we are defining gravity so we want a force along the y axis. The amount of gravity you need is effected by your projects frame rate and the speed you generally want things to happen. FOAM has a zero gravity example to implement a similar simulation in Box2D you would set the vectors y value to 0.

// Allow bodies to sleep
var doSleep:Boolean = true;
// Construct a world object
world = new b2World(worldAABB, gravity,doSleep);
//start listening for enter frame events
this.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, Update);

private function Update(event:Event):void
{ 
 world.Step(timeStep, iterations);
 // Render bodies
 // Go through body list and update sprite positions/rotations
 for (var bb:b2Body = world.m_bodyList; bb; bb = bb.m_next)
 {
  if (bb.m_userData is Sprite)
  {
   bb.m_userData.x = bb.m_position.x;
   bb.m_userData.y = bb.m_position.y;
   bb.m_userData.rotation = degrees(bb.m_rotation);
  }
 }
}

The world's m_bodyList is an array of b2Body objects. Each b2Body's userData represents the Sprite or MovieClip used to represent the b2Body. At each step the world calculates the positions and interactions of each b2Body. It's then up to you to update the userData's position. An update mechanism is provided by most of the other engines but Box2D expects you to manage this updates yourself. What is important to note is that changing a b2Body's position or rotation doesn't change it Sprites position and rotation. Therefore, if you want to manually move a Body then you will also need to manually move the userData's position.

These are the basics of getting started with Box2D. What's missing from this post is how you actually add Bodies to your world. Adding a Body in Box2D takes almost as much code as setting up the world and updating it. So it seemed best to save that for another post.

Melbourne Flex 3/AIR Pre-release event

Added 18/01/08 : Demand for this event has out stripped expectations and the number of registered attendees has exceeded the venues capacity. If you registered prior to this addition then you should receive an invitation confirming you've registration and providing venue details.

Last week I posted regarding the possibility of Danny Dura coming to Melbourne for a Flex 3/AIR Pre-release event. Well it's confirmed now. This will be a great opportunity for the uninitiated to discover what Flex has to offer and for Flex developers to see first hand the many new features of Flex 3. Attendees will go in the draw for a copy of CS3 Web Premium and Flex Builder 3 Professional.

If you'd like to find out more about Danny Dura then take a look at http://www.danieldura.com/.

Event date and details removed; these will be provided in an invitation email.

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Actionscript 2D Physics Engines : Motor 2

This post is part of a series reviewing the available Actionscript 2D Physics Engines. Each engine was tested through the development of three simple simulations; Hello World, Rope Bridge and Stunt Bike. You can find out more about the testing methodology and access the other reviews from the introduction post.

Motor 2 is the newest of the Actionscript 2D Physics Engines. Like Box2DFlashAS3 it is a port of Erin Catto's C++ physics library Box2D. Though it is probably more accurate to call it a series of variations on Box2D's themes as Michael Baczynski has exchanged some of Catto's libraries for his own.

I want to start by saying this isn't a review in the same sense as my posts on the other engines. The current Motor 2 release is just a preview. Major features like joints/constraints still need to be implemented. From my perspective that means I couldn't build 2 out of 3 of the test simulations (both Rope Bridge and Stunt Bike require joints). Consequently I haven't built anything with Motor 2. What I offer here is some observations based on looking at the demos and staring at the available code long enough to know where to start building a simulation. I offer this post from the perspective of someone who has spent quite a few hours with the other available engines and is therefore able to make some comparative observations. But really it is a placholder awaiting a more complete release.

So what can I say about Motor 2?

On the up side the demos suggest that the engine will be reasonable fast and accurate. The demo code suggests that Motor 2 is much cleaner than Box2DFlashAS3 and consequently will be easier to pick up (I suspect it will have a similar learning curve to FOAM). Another plus is that the source code is commented. The commenting isn't as comprehensive as APE or FOAM but it's still a vast improvement over Box2DFlashAS3.

On the down side we have no documentation outside the code. The demos are too simple to give us an idea of the engines potential and there is no roadmap to indicate what a full feature set will include.

In summary, I'd say that Motor 2 shows a lot of promise but that it's too early to make a call. I look forward to a more complete release so I can run a few tests and review these observations.

Actionscript 2D Physics Engines : Box2DFlashAS3

This post is part of a series reviewing the available Actionscript 2D Physics Engines. Each engine was tested through the development of three simple simulations; Hello World, Rope Bridge and Stunt Bike. You can find out more about the testing methodology and access the other reviews from the introduction post.

Box2DFlashAS3 is the most difficult Actionscript Physics Engine to learn. Like Motor 2 it is a port of Erin Catto's C++ physics library Box2D but unlike Motor 2 little effort has been made to assimilate the engine to Actionscripts methodologies. Consequently Box2D's approach may seem a bit foreign to some Actionscript developers. It's only documentation is that provided by Erin Catto for the C++ version and there are very few helper functions to ease the developers burden. To be honest my first instinct was to stay as far away from Box2DFlashAS3 as was possible. Fortunately Box2DFlashAS3 offers an excellent collection of demos covering a wide range of use cases. It also offers 6 distinct joint types and a lot of flexibility in how you create DisplayObject's for your particles. Once I got over the initial shock I found Box2DFlashAS3 was a workable tool. I had no trouble building the Hello World and Rope Bridge simulations and while I'm no where near happy with the Stunt Bike. I'm fairly confident that most of the problems are my own rather than the engines.

In summary, Box2DFlashAS3 offers a substantial learning curve but there are a lot of payoffs. This is partly because Box2DFlashAS3 is the most mature of the available engines (current release version : 1.4.3). It certainly helps that it is a comprehensive port of an existing engine. I still think I'd prefer to be able to use one of the other engines. But because I'm keen to do 2D Physics in Actionscript today then I think Box2DFlashAS3 is my only real option.

Melbourne Flex/AIR Event

There is a good chance that Danny Dura , an Adobe Platform Evangelist from Adobe U.S.A, will be coming to Melbourne for a Flex/AIR presentation on the evening of Tuesday the 29th of January, 2008. This is an excellent opportunity for developers keen to find out more about Flex and AIR and for existing Flex developers to get some pre-release insights into Flex 3. Currently they are requesting expressions of interest to gauge the level of interest for this event. If you are free and interested head on over to TechEvents and register your intent.

Actionscript 2D Physics Engines : FOAM

This post is part of a series reviewing the available Actionscript 2D Physics Engines. Each engine was tested through the development of three simple simulations; Hello World, Rope Bridge and Stunt Bike. You can find out more about the testing methodology and access the other reviews from the introduction post.

FOAM isn't quite as easy to use as APE but it is still easy to use. Once again there is good documentation and some useful demos. Of all the engines I think it is the one most in tune with common Actionscript 3 development techniques and hence will look most familiar if you've spent much time with AS3 development. As the screenshot shows it offers a lot more options for adding different shapes to your simulation. For example, every shape in the screenshot (except for the circle) was created using ShapeUtil.createSymmetricPolygon(sides,size). Foam also doesn't require an enterFrame function to update the simulation. Instead you call foam.simulate() and it looks after stepping through the simulation.

So far so good. FOAM had no trouble making the Hello World simulation. Unfortunately, the news is not good for the Rope Bridge simulation. FOAM offers two types of constraints and these both offer some useful properties but at the end of the day I was unable to configure them in a manner that would create my Rope Bridge. The two joined objects were always too far away from each other. So my bridge always ended up looking more like an alpine rescue mission. Perhaps I'm missing a vital element here. It's hard to know. FOAM is the only engine that doesn't have some kind of bridge in the available demos. That could be because a bridge isn't possible at this stage or that it wasn't deemed of interest for the demo. It is worth noting that FOAM is an 0.1 alpha release. I'm sure there is still a lot of work to be done before it reaches a beta state.

In summary, FOAM looks very promising. It's simple to use and flexible with good documentation but I imagine it is still too immature to be used for anything at this stage.

Actionscript 2D Physics Engines : APE

This post is part of a series reviewing the available Actionscript 2D Physics Engines. Each engine was tested through the development of three simple simulations; Hello World, Rope Bridge and Stunt Bike. You can find out more about the testing methodology and access the other reviews from the introduction post.

Of the available Actionscript 2D Physics Engines APE is without a doubt the easiest to learn. This is partly due to good documentation, the availability of some clear tutorials and comprehensive demos. Even if these resources didn't exist APE would still be the easiest to learn. The APE Engine aims to do as much of the heavy lifting for you as is possible. The process for creating a working simulation might be :

• Initialise APE Engine with APEEngine.init()
• Add gravity with APEngine.addForce()
• Create a group
• Create a particle (e.g RectangleParticle)
• Add particle to group
• Add group to APEngine with APEngine.addGroup()
• Add an enterFrame listener (and function)
• Call APEngine.step() and APEngine.paint() in the enterFrame function

The downside to simplicity is reduced flexibility. I had no problems building either the Hello World or the Rope Bridge simulations. Where I ran into problems was creating the Stunt Bike. The issue is that there is only one type of contraint (the SpringConstraint) and this doesn't have many properties. This limitation is particularly apparent when you look at the Box2DFlashAS3 which has 6 distinct types of constraint (called joints).

Another limitation of APE is that there is no support for complex shapes. The engine creates three types of object ; a RectangleParticle, a CircleParticle, and a WheelParticle (a CircleParticle that turns when in contact with a surface). This is offset in a small way by letting you set a MovieClip as the Particles DisplayObject, but this is possible with all the engines.

In summary, APE is easy to learn and use but a limited feature set will make it unsuitable for more complex projects. Having said that APE is still in it's alpha version and this may not be the complete set of features. There isn't a project roadmap available so it is unclear what a full feature set may contain.

Actionscript 2D Physics Engines Reviewed

For a while now I've been keen to get up to speed on the available 2D Physics Emgines for Actionscript. On New Years Eve Polygon Labs released a new Actionscript 2D Physics Engine : Motor2. Like Box2DFlashAS3 Motor2 is based on Erin Catto's c++ physics library Box2D. This release means there are now five Actionscript 2D Physics Engines available :

• APE : review
  
• Foam : review
  
• Box2DFlashAS3 : review
• Motor 2 : review
  
• The Fisix Engine

Henry Jones has posted a brief overview of all the engines, except Motor2, over on his blog. The release of Motor2 provides a good opportunity to bite the bullet and have a closer look at the available engines.

Methodology

To learn and test each engine I decided to build three simulations :

Hello World

This is a very simple simulation involving dropping a "ball" onto a sloping ramp. It essential is the most minimal simulation you can imagine. You need to create two types of shape (a circle and a rectangle), one fixed and one dynamic and you need to rotate one of the shapes. The objective here is to learn the fundamental mechanics of the engine.

Rope Bridge

The Rope Bridge simulation involves tying together a sequence of "planks" so they don't fall. Two of the engines have rope bridges in their demo application providing examples of best practices for building the bridge. The objective is to get an understanding of the basic constraint options for each engine. As with Hello World a ball is dropped onto the bridge to see how it reacts to a force.

Stunt Bike

The final test involves making a more complex object and running it down a ramp. The stunt bike has two wheels. The front wheel is connected to a steering column. In turn the steering column is connected at two points to the bikes body. The bikes body is connected to the back wheel. The objective here is to explore each engines constraint system in more detail.

You'll note that I'm not considering any benchmarking at this stage. This may seem odd as any simulation will live or die based on it's speed (and accuracy). I'm sure I'll be thinking in terms of benchmarking in the future. But for now my primary interest is what can each system do and how easy is it to do it. On the surface we might be forgiven for expecting a 2D Physics Engine to have a consistent set of features but that is definitely not the case here. Each of these engines has quite different objectives and therefore quite a distinct feature set.

Also note that I won't be testing either Motor2 or The Fisix Engine. For this review I'm interested in open source alternatives and Fisix is only free for non-commercial use. I haven't created any simulations using Motor2. At the moment the available demo's are too simple for my needs and there isn't any documentation to speak of. I will make some observations about Motor2. They will essentailly be what you might learn from staring at the engines code until it starts to make sense.

I will create seperate post for each engine I review. This will keep each post brief and easy to find. I will use this post to provide links to each review in the series.

My Top 10 Posts of 2007

Looking through this blogs stats for 2007 I thought it would be interesting to list the Top 10 most visited posts of the year :

1. Silverlight Vs Flash
2. Hacking htmlText in Flex 2
3. Adobe CS3 : Install Headache
4. Flex LinkButton : Transparent Backgrounds?
5. Adobe CS4 : RIA Premium ?
6. Fireworks CS3 : Creating Flex Symbols
7. Flex LinkButton : Background Color
8. Flex Frameworks : Getting Started with Cairngorm
9. Flash Quicktime Controller : Quicktime API
10. Drupal multisite setup

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