Rapid Physics is a custom Physics Engine that I decided to build in Flash.
Why would I torture myself like that?
There are plenty of industrial-strength physics engines out there, such as Havok and Box2D. They offer complete and robust physics simulations, but they also hide a lot of information from the programmers that use them. This leads to two problems:
- Hard limits on authorship control over the physics simulation (lots of code you didn't write)
- A sense of helplessness when debugging engine-level problems (lots of code you didn't test)
Effectively, game programmers lose the granularity to control subtle features of the physics simulation, and the ability to do custom collision resolution for gameplay purposes. For games whose physics are integral to gameplay, there is still a place for custom physics implementations.
I designed Rapid Physics to tackle one specific problem that most general-purpose physics engines never attempt to address: Tunneling
