I was hoping to have an update a little earlier than this, but decided to hold off and throw together at least a bit of content with the update. I’ve added a slew of joints and controllers into the Farseer engine for Blitzmax (which I think I’ll just start referring to as just Farseer.BMX to save my poor little fingers). Below is a list of stuff I’ve added since the initial post:

  • Angle Limit Joints (featured in the youtube video below) – this allows you to do some interesting joint behaviors that could potentially allow you to create a 2D ragdoll of sorts with limb constraints.
  • Fixed Angle Limit Joints – Same as above except instead of linking two objects together, only one is used and it’s angle is limited.
  • Fixed Angle Joints – Allows you to make an object always point in a certain direction. You can think of it as a way to disable ‘rotation’ for a particular object, and it will always be set at some angle from some anchor regardless of where it is in the world.
  • Angle Springs – You can link two bodies and they will attempt to align themselves to a certain angle using spring physics to give a bouncy effect.
  • Interactive Angle Joints (untested)
  • Circular Interpolator (untested)
  • Pin Joint – This one allows you to choose an anchor on two bodies and a distance, and the two physics bodies will always stay that distance apart, but still tumble and interact with other bodies realistically.
  • Slider Joint – Same concept as a ‘Pin Joint’ except now instead of a concrete distance apart there is a minimum distance and a maximum distance these two objects will stay within.
  • Brute Force Collider – Just another broad phase collider you can use instead of the default one. I may dig up a forum post by Jeff and others that describes the advantages/disadvantages among the different colliders you can choose from in Farseer.
  • Some getters/setters for the physics debug viewer class – Makes the debugger class a little easier to use.
  • Fixed a few minor bugs

Anyway, the video I posted isn’t that impressive but shows you that Farseer makes it pretty easy to setup different types of constraints and scenarios with just a few classes. There’s no new demo application to download for this update as I’m pretty close to finishing up the rest of the port, and would rather just wrap up a few more demos and get the code out there for others to use. Hopefully I’ll have more in a week or so!