Tom’s Graphic Design Journal

So I'm going to try and post to my blog more often. I research non-stop and really need to write down a lot of it for my own reference now moreso than ever. However, don't forget that I also put interesting sites into my custom Google search engine for design.

So what did I find this time? Fisix and APE. Two physics engines for ActionScript3 / Flash 9. Wonderful libraries that make the tasks of gravity, bounce, velocity, collision, springs, and more very easy! Essentially you can just stick in a nice easy line of code and voila you have a ball/wheel that can bounce around and interact with things in your "world." Same goes for creating lines/planes/vectors/etc. that can have different properties applied to them to modify such objects.

All in all my taste of physics engines in AS3 ranged from easy to advanced...there is quite a bit of math involved when you get down to it and it really started bringing back memories of my high school physics class and all the spring formulas, etc.

So what can you do with a physics engine? Well, you probably will want to be making animations, simulations, or games with it. I suppose you could have an informative web site that has windows that bounce around with info in them, or perhaps a slick navigation, but that's probably a seldom thing.

The Fisix Engine is available for use in Flex projects and APE (Actionscript Physics Engine) is available for use in Flex and Flash CS3 projects.