Re: advice on physics engines

Heya,

I just uploaded Collision::Util 0.01 to CPAN. Like Kartik mentioned,
it is still available only in pure-perl form, but it should do the
trick for a while. Please report any bugs and/or feature requests you
may have.

It currently expects any object with ->x, ->y, ->w, ->h value
accessors (it only checks values and will never change anything),
treating them as simple rectangles (y and x being top-left values).

Functions are NOT exported by default. They are:

check_contains() to see if the first rect contains the other rects
check_collision() to see if the first rect is colliding with the other rects

here, "other rects" can be either a single rect, an array reference of
rects or a hash reference. The Pod documentation includes some
examples and a much better description :-)

Hope you find this useful!

Cheers,

breno

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 10:23 AM, Kartik Thakore
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Dan,
>
> Breno is working on a Collision::Util
> (http://github.com/garu/Collision-Util/) module to do Collision detection.
> It is still early. I will help Breno move some of the core of this module to
> XS for speed later.
>
> I am actually also interested in bringing a physics engine to Perl via some
> good C libraries ( http://ode.org/) . I haven't done anything yet but if
> there is interest I will be willing to start porting one.
>
> Cheers,
> Kartik Thakore
>
> On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 12:32 AM, Dan Kortschak
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Kartik,
>>
>> I'm wanting to do some GA work with some spatial objects in Perl -
>> basically some evolutionary biology research looking at group selection
>> dynamics, so I need to figure out a really simple physics engine -
>> basically just collision detection (no problem) and position adjustment.
>> All the objects are circular for convenience. I've never done any
>> physics simulations, so this is all new to me. I've done some thinking
>> about it and 2 bodies is easy - any more is quite difficult and
>> potentially time consuming which is a no-no for the GA.
>>
>> Since you've been doing lots of work on SDL, I thought you would be a
>> good person to ask for advice on whether there are either good places to
>> read up on this or already written modules that are reasonably light
>> weight - I couldn't find anything that looked right on CPAN. I don't
>> need any graphics, just positions.
>>
>> thanks for your time
>> Dan
>> --
>> Dan Kortschak <[email protected]>
>>
>
>