This post is part of the “Lets make a 3D game” series. 3D and physics simulation always go well together even more so with marble games. One is required for marblesoccer but i wasnt convinced by current 3d physics engines. I explain why at the end. Fortunatly, @pyalot from codeflow.org has been kind enough to write one taylor-made for us: microphysics.js!!

It is bite-sized, elegant and efficient. Less than 500 lines at the moment!! It is small engouh to be understood, important feature for a tutorial blog. It is a work in progress tho. We aren’t aware of any bugs. New features will be added and the API is expected to move. Currently it implements moving spheres and static boxes (or AABB as we like to say). This is all we need for marblesoccer, the good thing about tailor-made. We are in business!!!

Below is a screencast of me doing a short introduction of the playground. This just a page for you to experiment with microphysics.js.

Let’s get started

So lets see how to use it. First step, you download it here. Then include it in your own code with this line.

1 <script src= "physics.js" ></script>

Let’s Create a World

Quite a title hey ? Dont you feel like galactus when you say it ? First you instanciate the physics world like this.

1 var world = new vphy . World ()

Now you start it. Dont forget to give it the date as you see it.

1 world . start ( Date . now () / 1000 );

The world is now fully initialized. You just have to periodically update it in your game/render loop.

1 2 var timeStep = 1 / 180 ; world . step ( timeStep , Date . now () / 1000 );

The timeStep parameter is the precision of the physics engine, expressed in seconds. Quite a subtle tradeoff. The smaller it is, the more accurate is the physics, but the slower it is to compute. Up to you to find the balance that fit your needs.

Let’s Add Bodies

Don’t worry, this is not about killing people and dispose of their dead bodies :) In physics, A body is a solid object that you put in your world. microphysics bodies can be spheres or static boxes. Lets start right away by creating a sphere.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 var sphere = new vphy . Sphere ({ x : 10 , y : 10 , z : 10 , restitution : 0.6 , radius : 5 , });

This will position it at (10,10,10) in the world. restitution will determine how bouncy is this during a collision. A bouncing ball restitutes a lot. A falling eggs restitutes less :) This declaration seems quite verbose at first. Don’t worry those parameters got sensible defaults, no need to specify them all.

Now lets add it to our world

1 world . add ( sphere );

If you need to remove it, just do world.remove(sphere) . Not too hard hey ? Now lets create a static box. Boxes are called AABB. It stands for Axis-aligned bounding box. It is graphic jarguon for the smallest box containing your object. vphy.Sphere and vphy.AABB both derived from vphy.Body . x, y, z, resitution are vphy.Body parameters, common to both. So we wont review them again.

1 2 3 4 5 var body = new vphy . AABB ({ width : 1 , height : 1 , depth : 1 });

width , height and depth gives the dimensions of the box. After world.step() , you can read the new position of each body. Quite usefull to push back the resulting physics in your 3D scene :)

1 var pos = body . getPosition (); // x = pos[0], y = pos[1], z = pos[2]

Ok, so we got a world with solid objects in it, all bound to physical law. Now what about moving them ?

Let’s move our Bodies

Lets make our sphere moves. The bodies you added to the world will move according to the forces applied on them. All that according to laws of motion from Newton. He discovered that by receiving an apple on the head, creativity can take strange paths sometime :)

Ok let’s add gravity, the force which moved this falling apple. This force is applied along a given direction to all our objects. The library already contains an helper just for that. Simply do

1 2 3 4 5 world . add ( new vphy . LinearAccelerator ({ x : 0 , y : - 9.8 , z : 0 }));

Quite easy, no? Now lets see a custom accelerator, for example a player moving according to the keyboard. The player will be a vphy.Sphere and we will reuse the keyboard helper we did in this post.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 var player = new vphy . Sphere ({ radius : 20 }); world . add ({ type : vphy . types . ACCELERATOR , // let the lib know it is an accelerator perform : function ( bodies ){ // bodies is the array of all vphy.Body if ( keyboard . pressed ( 'right' ) ) player . accelerate ( 1 , 0 , 0 ); if ( keyboard . pressed ( 'left' ) ) player . accelerate ( - 1 , 0 , 0 ); if ( keyboard . pressed ( 'up' ) ) player . accelerate ( 0 , 0 , 1 ); if ( keyboard . pressed ( 'down' ) ) player . accelerate ( 0 , 0 , - 1 ); } });

.perform() will be called at every world step. It accesses player via closure , read current keyboard state and accelerate in the proper direction.

Motivation

The need for 3D physics is clear for marblesoccer. Marble in physics are fun, generic and instinctive for the player. Ok so how to get a 3D physics engine ?

Do it yourself ? Well no, it is hard, long and im lazy :)

Well no, it is hard, long and im lazy :) Use an existing one ? i tried some and left unimpressed. All those are new experimental stuff. Documentation is inexistant. They are issued from existing libraries in other languages and convert them to js, sometime multiple conversions in a row. I experienced major bugs when i tried. Were those bugs ? Was it me misusing it ? Quite possible as the doc is inexistant. All in all, i didnt feel it would be a reliable dependancy for our game.

i tried some and left unimpressed. All those are new experimental stuff. Documentation is inexistant. They are issued from existing libraries in other languages and convert them to js, sometime multiple conversions in a row. I experienced major bugs when i tried. Were those bugs ? Was it me misusing it ? Quite possible as the doc is inexistant. All in all, i didnt feel it would be a reliable dependancy for our game. Used a 2D one, like Box2D ? Box2D is kind of special. Seth Ladd recently did a lot of good things to explain box2D. Ok, box2D is a converted one but it is of very good quality. So why not using box2D ? Well because it is 2D and we do 3D. Quite an insight, hey :) It would be such a tough limitation. This webgl + box2D strategy can produce excelent results tho, like this game demo from @einaros. Take a close look at the physics when object move, it is amazingly realistic and it is all box2D.

Box2D is kind of special. Seth Ladd recently did a lot of good things to explain box2D. Ok, box2D is a converted one but it is of very good quality. So why not using box2D ? Well because it is 2D and we do 3D. Quite an insight, hey :) It would be such a tough limitation. This webgl + box2D strategy can produce excelent results tho, like this game demo from @einaros. Take a close look at the physics when object move, it is amazingly realistic and it is all box2D. Ask somebody else to do it ? We got a winner! @pyalot from codeflow.org

Credits

All images are from wikipedia. All hard work is from @pyalot

Conclusion

This is the first post about physics. It presented microphysics.js API. Thus you can start playing with it immediatly. More posts will come shortly. At least, one about performance and another one on how to easily bind microphysics to your three.js game. That’s all folks. Have fun with microphysics.js :)