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DragonRuby Game Toolkit

An intuitive 2D game engine. Fast, cross-platform, tiny, hot loaded. · By DragonRuby

Chipmunk2D or similar

A topic by adamgcwatkins created Dec 28, 2020 Views: 1,215 Replies: 10
Viewing posts 1 to 4

First - thank you for DragonRuby, and second - thank you for including it in the Bundle for Racial Justice earlier this year!

I was wondering if there were any immediate plans to include Chipmunk2D or a similar 2D physics engine?

(I note that Chipmunk was briefly mentioned here: https://itch.io/t/447676/a-few-questions-on-features )

I'd really like to avoid trying to cack-handedly put something together myself if you're likely to provide something far better in a few months!

Yes, Physics support via e.g. Chipmunk would be a welcome addition!

Developer

The Professional version of DragonRuby Game Toolkit allows you to create C Extensions. You can leverage any C library you’d like :-)

(+1)

A physics engine seems like such a basic feature.

Developer

a basic feature?

Developer (3 edits)

Here’s one the sample apps from the Standard edition of the game engine. What are you explicitly looking for in physics? Standard

(-1)

Every engine being sold that I've run across has had some form of rigidbody physics.

Developer (1 edit)

We considered incorporating one, but at the end of the day it just added complexity to the apis. We’ve never had great experiences with built-in physics engines. And for 2D games, we found that the geometry apis we provide to determine collision were good enough.

I understand that you think it should be a standard/default feature. I really do get that. But we didn’t want to incorporate something half-assed just to check a checkbox on a feature list.

To prove my point.

Take any of the engines you’ve evaluated and try to get a sprite to run up a diagonal ramp. It should be a piece of cake with a built in physics engine. Right?

Another thing to try. Have a platform that moves up and down. And try to get your player sprite to stay in sync with the platform’s movement, until they jump. Again, this should be trivial to do.

(+1)(-1)

Godot's default 2d rigidbody physics are excellent, at the very least, and Unity's 2d physics are passable. Certainly better than nothing.

(+1)

Personally, I'm glad DRGT doesn't have a full blown built-in physics engine, this is a detail that I'm interested in implementing a solution for instead of attempting to tailor a "one size fits all" unity-ish solution to work for my desired implementation. Once you start digging under the hood of DRGT you'll find it has many of the utilities (geometry/LERP functions, etc) you need to get there and you're usually just an abstraction or two away from a working implementation. 

I don't think there is a "right answer" here, it all comes down to personal preference. 

As a game player, I think off the shelf physics engines make games feel too samey.  Mario and Megaman feel very different because they rolled their own physics.  I'm not making a plea to 'learn to code' here, I"m making a plea to not rely so heavily on things that remove the individuality of your game.  
I welcome the hate, though.