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 There is also a short (outdated) demonstration video.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:

ignore [dependencies] nphysics2d = "0.1.*"

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

ignore [dependencies] nphysics3d = "0.1.*"

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.

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 (see https://github.com/natal/roft for a draft).
• 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:

• kiss3d: the 3d graphics engine.
• rust-sfml: the 2D graphics engine. See windows installation instructions.