If you have played a game on the mobile phones, you must have marveled at the way physics was handled. You almost feel, WOW! How cool, how did they write all that code to manage the physics part of things. The bounce, the interactions with objects, the gravity, etc.
Enter frameworks like Box2D, Chipmunk Physics that abstract all the hard-work of using physics. With CoronaSDK, Using physics is a matter of a few lines of code. However when using bodies with physics, these have a rectangular outline that define the bodies. To enable a higher degree of realism, the outline can be traced to make the body a non rectangular shape. This is not exactly an easy task, but Andreas Loew (of Texture Packer fame from Code'n'Web) has PhysicsEditor. This makes it easy to visually edit and create outlines for objects and are saved as line co-ordinates in a lua file. Which are reassembled when executed creating a shape and applying the appropriate attributes of the object like the Friction, bounce and density.
The feature that is most helpful is the Autotrace feature, rather than sit and hand draw the outlines, Autotrace creates the outline for the images.
In Corona, a physics body is added as follows
local image1 = display.newImage("myImage.png")
physics.addBody(image1,{friction=0.5, density=0.3, bounce=0.4})
This would create a physics enabled image (myImage.png) called image1, however this image shall be a rectangular physics body, so if the image was a diamond shape, it is quite odd for a diamond shape to behave like a crate or a box.
Using PhysicsEditor, these parameters are all set from the GUI editor and the way to reference it is
local PhysicsData = local physicsData = (require "shapedefs").physicsData()
local image1 = display.newImage("myImage.png")
physics.addBody(image1,PhysicsData:get(image1))
This is a newly released application, it is complete in itself but I am sure as users provide feedback, there will be more features added to the same. This is available for both Windows and the Mac, it is priced at $ 17.95, however if you purchase both TexturePacker and PhysicsEditor, you would only pay $29.99
PhysicsEditor is available from ( http://www.physicseditor.de/ )
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