Andrew Nash

First mini-game for TouchMagic is now complete; dragging one sprite around the screen to a target area. Now to move on to something a little bit harder, physics.

Andengine’s physics support is done through andenginephysicsbox2dextension, which makes use of the Box2D Physics Engine. Using the examples provided and some of the simple tutorials out on the web, the physics engine is pretty easy to use providing you are dealing with simple objects like circles and rectangles. I however needed more complex objects than this, and was daunted by the fact of having to specify the edges of each object I wanted (especially objects based of circles). After a bit of digging around however, I came across this tutorial written by Johannes Borchardt. He has put together an AndEngine extension that makes use of a the program PhysicsEditor. PhysicsEditor will take an image of an object and trace around the object to generate a polygonal body for the image, making it really easy to represent it in a wide variety of gaming engines. This really looks like a must-buy for any game developer and can seriously cut down on the work developers have to do for their physics based games.