0xtob’s coding blog

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

I’m happy to announce that fixed point math and the DS target are now officially supported in Box2D! So if you were using the fixed point patches before, you can now just check out the latest SVN version of Box2D. Check this thread for further updates! Huge thanks to Kavaler for his help with the fixed point port!

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.

This might become interesting.

Big thanks to bushing, segher, tmbinc, wintermute and everyone else working hard to make Wii homebrew possible!

Version 0.4 is out and adds saving and loading! Never lose your work again, and share your creations with others!

Get it from the project homepage!

I want to highlight a really fun music application called MIDI Jammer by Andrew Buch, which uses DSMI for sending MIDI events. The touch screen is divided into horizontal/vertical bars which are mapped to notes of a scale that can be configured by the user. You can jam around just by sliding the stylus over the bars. The fun thing is that it’s pressure sensitive, so the volume depends on the pressure you apply. In another mode the program can also be used as a Kaoss Pad (which is more flexible than KaossDS). Andrew is planning on a standalone mode that uses the PSG for live chip-style jamming!

Here’s a new version with a larger drawing area, dual screen support, updated physics and more!

The top screen displays an overview and the bottom screen shows a zoomed in view.

Here’s a contraption in which a car hits some dominoes, the last domino falls on a seesaw and makes a ball fall into a shopping cart.

Get it at the project homepage!

Here’s a new release of the DS port of Box2D. Robert Kavaler helped me out a lot on this by porting the changes to the SVN version of the (still work-in-progress) Box2D 2.0 and adding a nice build system. Although this is a patch of an unstable version of Box2D it works very stable. By using the DS’s hardware division and sqrt functions I improved simulation speed. Instead of the patches library, the archive now contains a patch with instructions how to acquire and patch Box2D.

Download: box2d_svn_r80_fixed.tgz

JCRocky5 made this great ragdoll video with Pocket Physics

Pocket Physics v0.2 is out! Main new feature: Pins!

You can now play with seesaws…

cars…

and even ragdolls!

Get it at the project homepage!