Physics Links

The Chipmunk Physics Engine on PSP

Videos have been uploaded on Youtube about the latest version of Chipmunk Physics engine on the Sony Playstation Portable console as the gaming trend takes a turn towards technology which combines law of physics with the excitement of gaming. It is a portable open source two dimensional rigid body physics library distributed under the MIT licence. With an independent OS and thoughtfully written in C99 by Scot Lembecke, Chimpunk is intended to be lightning fast, portable, numerically stable and easy to use.

There are different kinds of body forms such as rigid, soft and fluid which in turn have their own dynamics and physical systems. For example; the movement of water into a container is different from the movement of a rigid pot falling onto a slope. A Physics Engine is computer software that provides an approximate simulation of these physical systems in domains of computer graphics, video games and film.  The main uses are in video games as middleware and the simulations in this case are real time.

Chipmunk is used in hundreds of games all over the world in just about any system. This technology is used effectively by Sony to improve the usability of the portable Playstation console. The PSP games that currently use the Chipmunk physics engine are Stakker, Anti-Tetris and Brix DS. Stakker PSP is a fun game of building up and destroying towers made out of falling blocks. The motto of the game is to build up towers without letting any piece fall off and after reaching a certain height; it is to be destroyed with a projectile coming from the left for points. Anti-Tetris is a visual reproduction of Game boy Tetris and is based on the physics engine which allows the gamer to fasten and slow down the fall of the pieces at will.

With Brix DS, the objective is to remove all the bricks of grey level without dropping the dynamites to the ground. The gamer would encounter different types of bricks throughout various levels as the physics engine makes movement of the bricks realistic. Many game developers are now using the Chipmunk Physics engine to develop first person shooter games and various other games across various genres. Chipmunk seems to have opened a new door to seamless opportunities in the multi-billion dollar gaming industry.

Author Biography: This is a guest article written by Sapna, Manager at Taaza.com, an Indian horizontal site. Significant verticals include Jobs, Classifieds, News and Education.

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The project’s mastermind is David Glowacki, a researcher at the University of Bristol in the UK. In this special video report, Glowacki talks to Physics World journalist James Dacey about his stimulus for the project and how the technology involved was inspired by some of the concepts from his research in theoretical chemistry. Glowacki describes how the project came about through a conversation with a friend about making music via motion. “What we quickly found out was that the idea had been done to death, so I came up with a more interesting way of attacking that problem,” he explains.

Read More at physicsworld.com

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