Box2D -Part I-

Most of my previous research dealed with soft bodies, collision detection, real-time optimisation, biped robotics for virtual humans, but very recently I have started to investigate rigid body constraints (rigid body contacts, distance constraints, etc.) for real-time simulations.

I must confess that I am quite new in this. i.e. I have never implemented a contact ball constraint... now, this is about to change. Rigid body research is not new at all, there are more than 20 years that people has spent on that and now there are really good commercial software out there (e.g. Havok, Ageia, etc.) and also open source, like Bullet.

This is great, but still, if you want to implemented from nothing, you might need some documentation. Papers are the best choice, but if you have simple code available is just fantastic. So, I have found Box2D . It is an open source software where rigid body dynamics is implemented in 2D in a very friendly manner. It has been coded with an incredible videogame taste. It has already been used in some 2D videogames.

And the best thing for me is that it has the implementation of constraints in 2D. This implementation is actually 2D version of the constraints implemented in Bullet !

I have compiled some tests and surfed throughout the code and it is really good... so, as a first look, Box2D seems a very didactical starting point for rigid body simulation for games.