Edward Cherlin wrote: > Has anybody looked at this for the XO? > > http://opensimulator.org/wiki/PhysicsEngines > > The physics is not very realistic yet. Presumably we could manage > simple statics and dynamics, with graphs of position, velocity, and > acceleration. > > I would like to have a simulation engine available for integration > into e-textbooks. What other candidates are there? > >
I've been looking at using Chipmunk (a 2D physics library: http://wiki.slembcke.net/main/published/Chipmunk) to do a simple activity which allows the user to draw shapes freehand, and then have them physically simulated. By choosing different pens, you can draw either fixed, rigid or flexible shapes. People have already developed similar programs using chipmunk, and the demo videos are very interesting. Unfortunately they seem to be under closed licenses. Besides, a Sugar version would be most interesting with some kind of mesh multiuser component, which would probably significantly change how the program evolves. I've done some very early prototypes on the XO, mostly by running the Chipmunk test program. It was surprisingly slow; I looked at optimising chipmunk to use 3dnow, but I suspect the bottleneck is in actually rendering (I have not profiled it properly). I was hoping to use Cairo for rendering, but it seems to be a bit too slow for smooth animated rendering. I was hoping to put together and announce something simple for people to poke at in the next week or two. J _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel