next »

[slembcke]

I had a fairly free day today so I figured I should get some of the trunk changes/fixes out into the wild.

Source (
OSX Demo Binary

Changes Since 5.0.0:

• FIX: fixed a NaN issue that was causing raycasts for horizontal or vertical lines to end up in an infinite loop
• FIX: fixed a number of memory leaks
• FIX: fixed warnings for various compiler/OS combinations
• API: Rejecting a collision from a begin() callback permanently rejects the collision until separation
  
• API: Erroneous collision type parameterns removed from cpSpaceDefaulteCollisionHandler()
  
• MOVE: FFI declarations of inlined functions into their own header
• MOVE: Rearranged the project structure to separate out the header files into a separate include/ directory.
  
• NEW: Added a static library target for the iPhone.
• NEW: Type changes when building on the iPhone to make it friendlier to other iPhone APIs
• NEW: Added an AABB query to complement point and segment queries
• NEW: CP_NO_GROUP and CP_ALL_LAYERS constants

As an aside, are there any MSVC users out there that can help me get Chipmunk compiling under MSVC again? I don't have MSVC to test it with. It apparently hasn't worked for a long time and I didn't find out until I released 5.0.0.

[Ivan]

Wow, that's really impressive. I'm actually tempted to switch over from Box2D. Is Chipmunk actually faster than box2d? In either case, some of these features are pretty amazing. Good job!

[slembcke]

Is Chipmunk actually faster than box2d?

Yes and no. We use different algorithms for some things so it really depends on what your game is like. In particular Chipmunk uses spatial hashing for it's collision detection, so if you have a lot of objects that are close to the same size, then it might be faster. If you have a lot of objects of differing sizes all in proximity to each other, Box2D's sort and sweep might be faster.

I've read a few posts where Chipmunk gave people a workable performance boost. Off the top of my head:
http://methodart.blogspot.com/2008/06/virtual-ball-pit-from-kevin-atkinson-on.html
http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/topic/3761

I've also read posts where Chipmunk turned out to be slower than Box2D. I don't have links to back that up though, but I have seen them. :p