Posted November 15, 2018 by simulatoralive
Well, I spent the last couple of days fiddling with API documentation and reading tutorials and to be honest, JBox2D is an absolute mess. It's API is absolutely terrible compared to most Java API documentation I've read (very minimal comments, bad/arcane naming conventions, etc.). I'm not sure why it and other Box2D derivatives are the defacto standard used by other 2D game engines written in Java. It's just a fairly direct port of a C++ physics engine (probably why it's API looks like crap to me).
I'm going to be using dyn4j, instead. Oddly, it was my first choice, but a lack of detailed tutorials got me looking elsewhere. Having examined the API documentation of both in detail, dyn4j is the clear winner. It's not nearly as complex as it first appeared to me. It's actually fairly simple to get a minimal program working and the API is much less painful to look at.