[OLPC-Games] Physics with Python and Pygame (Chipmunk 2D Physics Engine)

Chris Hager chris at linuxuser.at
Tue Mar 11 05:05:08 EDT 2008


Greg Ewing wrote:
> Chris Hager wrote:
>
>   
>> The chipmunk engine is easy, stable, fast, fun, open-source
>>     
>
> How stable is it, really?
>
> I've been playing around with ODE recently, and while it
> seems like it should be ideal for games, it has some
> problems. It only tests for collisions at discrete points
> in time, so if an object is moving too fast, collisions
> are missed and it flies through walls, etc. This is
> not really acceptable in a game.
>
>  From what I've seen on the web page, Chipmunk appears to
> use a similar approach, and would therefore suffer from
> the same problem. Anyone know any more?
>
>   

To me it seems quite stable. The demo's I've done never crashed once 
(because of chipmunk) and even fast flying elements collide quite well. 
Although it's true that if objects are moving too fast (so fast that you 
can't see them anymore), they will go through walls and get out. This 
would be possible to control by checking the speeds of the elements and 
having a kind of max value.

Why not go for a test, demo6, 7 and 8 are very, very enjoyable and you 
can test exactly this very well:

    http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Pymunx.zip

Cheers,

  Chris




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