Pocket Physics!
Did you ever sit on the bus and think “Damn, now I could really use a program that treats my drawings as physical scenes and simulates the interaction between objects on them!” ? Well, me neither, but here’s one anyways.
You can design scenes freely by drawing things with the stylus. Things can be solid, like ramps and floors, or dynamic, like balls or boxes. Like in The Incredible Machine, you can reset the scene, change it, and start the simulation again. It’s even more fun if you have a DS Motion, which can be used to control gravity!
Here’s what it looks like:
As you can see, the main inspiration comes from Crayon Physics :)
Some implementation details for those who care: For the physics simulation I used the Box2D library by Erin Catto (DS port here). For graphics, I’m using μLibrary by Brunni, which allows for fast drawing of 2D objects using the DS’s 3D capabilities. The background image is One for SXC by Felipe Skroski. The crayon texture was made in GIMP, and the sounds were recorded on my DS with NitroTracker :)
Get it from the project homepage and tell me what you think of it in the GBADev Forum or via comments.
December 23rd, 2007 at 8:58 pm
Amazing! No wonder you ported Box2D. Hmm, it’s fun to play around with but perhaps you could make it have some objectives like Crayon Physics has in addition to the sandbox mode. And scrolling on the bottom screen with the top screen as a minimap would be nice.
December 24th, 2007 at 3:13 am
Next update of nitrotraker please. Gamesound emulation and slicing? *flutters eye lashes*
December 24th, 2007 at 3:17 am
AND i’ve just tried pocket physics. Have you made the first and second best DS homebrews? I think you have
December 25th, 2007 at 11:52 am
it hangs up too much times,
what i think about it?
i think its amazing !!!!!!!
i hope u boost the performance, remove bugs and so on,
keep up the good work! u rlz.
January 9th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Ibrahim: Yup, it’s all planned!
Iain: Hehe, yeah I sort of cheated on NitroTracker but no one said I was married to it, so … oh well there are states where polygamy is socially accepted. Anyways, NitroTracker is far from dead and the next release will come soon! If I have free time that is. If anyone wants to pay me to do NitroTracker full time, please contact me :)
Jhon: I’m not s sure what I can do about performance, but stability is increasing (see 0.2)
If you have feature requests, please post them to this thread, so we have a central place for that.
January 20th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
What a great homebrew! I love it so much but unfortunately, it freezes a lot :/ Which one is the latest version though? Theres a v0.2 but on one of the sites a visited, it said u updated it again today (1/20/08). Anyway, I hope you can fix the freezing problem. Otherwise, hands down, one of the best homebrews I’ve ever laid hands on!
January 20th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Thank you! The current version (as of 2007-01-21) is 0.2. I’ll post news on new versions here and on the Pocket Physics homepage. I’m still struggling with the freezes. I won’t be able to eliminate them all probably, but I’m trying my best.