/nphysics

2 and 3-dimensional rigid body physics engine for Rust.

Primary LanguageRustBSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" LicenseBSD-3-Clause

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2D Documentation | 3D Documentation | Forum

nphysics

nphysics is a 2 and 3-dimensional physics engine for games and animations. It uses ncollide for collision detection, and nalgebra for vector/matrix math. 2D and 3D implementations both share the same code!

Examples are available in the examples2d and examples3d directories. There is also a short (outdated) demonstration video. An on-line version of this documentation is available here. Feel free to ask for help and discuss features on the official user forum.

Why another physics engine?

There are a lot of physics engine out there. However having a physics engine written in Rust is much more fun than writing bindings and has several advantages:

  • It shows that Rust is suitable for soft real-time applications.
  • It shows how well Rust behaves with highly generic code.
  • It shows that there is no need to write two separate engine for 2D and 3D: genericity wrt the dimension is possible (modulo low level arithmetic specializations for each dimension).
  • In a not-that-near future, C++ will die of ugliness. Then, people will search for a physics engine and nphysics will be there, proudly exhibiting its Rusty sexyness.

Compilation

You will need the latest release of the Rust compiler and the official package manager: Cargo.

If you want to use the 2D version of nphysics, add the crate named nphysics2d to your dependencies:

[dependencies]
nphysics2d = "0.6"

For the 3D version, add the crate named nphysics3d:

[dependencies]
nphysics3d = "0.6"

Use make examples to build the demos and execute ./your_favorite_example_here --help to see all the cool stuffs you can do.

Features

  • Static and dynamic rigid bodies.
  • Common convex primitives: cone, box, ball, cylinder.
  • Concave geometries build from convex primitives (aka. compound geometries).
  • Stable stacking.
  • Island based sleeping (objects deactivation).
  • Ray casting.
  • Swept sphere based continuous collision detection.
  • Ball-in-socket joint.
  • Fixed joint.
  • Sensors.

What is missing?

nphysics is a very young library and needs to learn a lot of things to become a grown up. Many missing features are because of missing features on ncollide. Features missing from nphysics itself include:

  • Kinematic bodies.
  • Efficient signaling system.
  • More joints, joint limits, joint motors and breakable joints.
  • Soft-bodies.
  • Parallel pipeline.
  • GPU-based pipeline.

Dependencies

All dependencies are automatically cloned with a recursive clone. The libraries needed to compile the physics engine are:

  • ncollide: the collision detection library.
  • nalgebra: the linear algebra library.

The libraries needed to compile the examples are: