Jean-Marc Le Roux Web, RIAs and chocolate spaghettis…

Flash 3D physics with Minko and jiglibflash

Drawing (a lot of) triangles is nice. But making them move is another problem... even harder: making them move like objects would move in real life! This is what a "physics engine" is about:

"A physics engine is computer software that provides an approximate simulation of certain simple physical systems, such as rigid body dynamics (including collision detection), soft body dynamics, and fluid dynamics, of use in the domains of computer graphics, video games and film. Their main uses are in video games (typically as middleware), in which case the simulations are in real-time. The term is sometimes used more generally to describe any software system for simulating physical phenomena, such as high-performance scientific simulation."

Source: Wikipedia, Physics engine

Flash is no exception and has a few physics engine libraries available. Nothing like a "high-performance scientific simulation" though...

Still, jiglibflash is one of those libraries. It is free and open-source. It provides a 3D-capable physics engine and exposes a rather simple API to make it work with any 3D graphics engine. Which brings me to the good news: Minko now supports jiglibflash!

Demo application right after the jump...