0xtob’s coding blog

Sh4wn is running return1.net/site/pp, which is a great place for sharing your Pocket Physics productions and for browsing though what others made. Recently, the interactive flash player by emeric was included in the site so you can now play back the sketches online and even interact with them! Accuracy is not 100% but I’m quite impressed how close it is.

Even if you don’t have Pocket Physics, do check out the site. Thanks a lot to Sh4wn and emeric for their efforts!

After a lot of optimization and bugfixing work, I’m releasing

Pocket Physics 0.6!

In this version I focused on speed and stability, and I think it shows. If you compare the speed to the old version, you think up to now everything was in slow motion! There are no more spontaneous explosions and no other randomness. If you restart the simulation, it will behave exactly like it did before. Also, it has become much more stable. In fact I cannot get it to crash any more! If you can, please tell me how!

Check it out! Although I didn’t add any new major features, I think this is a huge improvement!

And if you haven’t already, check out these sites for some great examples of what people are doing with Pocket Physics like the ones above:
http://pp.mnfu.com/
http://www.return1.net/site/pp

Sometimes when I added a new feature to Pocket Physics, I thought “This is actually quite fun!” In this version, I added the moving tool, and I must say: This is seriously an awful lot of fun! You can now directly interact with your sketches by grabbing and throwing objects with the stylus! Also, editing has become a lot easier because you don’t have to delete and re-draw objects to reposition them. Try it out, it’s really cool!

Get it from the project homepage!

Again, a big thank you to Erin Catto for making the amazing Box2D library!

A note on stability:
Pocket Physics uses a modified version of Box2D that uses fixed point math instead of floating point. Due to this conversion, a lot of unexpected things (spontaneous explosions, freezes, etc) can occur. I’m working on improving stability of Box2D, but it takes time to track down and fix these bugs, so please bear with me.