The first thing I did after installing Director was to try out the Ageia physics engine provided in Director 11. We all know that Ageia is quite powerful when it comes to physics simulations, but how much of it is really accessible using Director was my question…

A quick glance through the Director doc/readme and found that the feature set provided was pretty much sufficient to write casual games in 3d involving realtime physics :) . Happy news for people like me !!

Cons? Found that soft body dynamics was not supported , but really doubt myself using softbody dynamics in my games running on the browser ( might kill the users machine i nterms of performance ) , support for dynamic concave shapes was missing… but really do game developers really use dynamic concave shapes ? ( i really doubt that , it can hog your cpu and bring the FPS to a mere crawl ). Apart from this , i found the features available in Director 11 to be really more than enough to develop a decent 3d game involving physics.

Pros: Found the following features to be readily available in physics through Director 11:

• Rigidbody world properties like friction, velocity etc (the usual stuff that can be applied to rigidbodies)
• Constraints: Angular joint, Linear joint, 6 Degree of Freedom, Springs (good set here)
• Proxies:
  • box proxy
  • sphere proxy
  • concave shape ( can be static rigidbody only, usually used for terrains etc )
  • creating a terrain using heightmap ( can be static rigidbody only, usually a bitmap image containing the heightscale of a terrain )
  • Convex shape: Usually visualized as a plastic wrap around 3d models ( can be both dynamic and static rigidbodies )
• Raycasting: An excellent feature if you want to cast a ray from a point and find the objects falling in the path of the ray.
• Collision and Collision reports: Good collection of api/methods to handle your physics world rigidbody collision.

Now,I might have missed a few important features available in Director’s physics engine, but the above list is more than enough to get me all pumped up and start poking around with Director. Till then download the trial version of Director yourself and let me know if you find something interesting that you can share…

p.s: I’ll post some sample done with Director 11 physics engine sooon…