Box2D Wrapper

[slayer93]

Thanks, I'd be nice to see this part of PB one day, when it's finished.

Right now I'm adding in Contacts, which give collision information of everything, hopefully I can get it finished today otherwise It'll be finished before the end of the week along with some other things(may create another demo). :)

[kevin]

   Sounds good, the problem will be educating people on it's use.  Which can be lot trickier than what it might sound.  Moreover, I'd be tempted to completely detach it from the sprites, and let the use pick choose how they wish to represent the objects visually.

   Can certainly see there being a huge need for some type character designer to go with it also, wouldn't have to be pretty.. Just so user can get something on screen and get familiar with the terminology .  Including me.   I was thinking about using this in a little retro remake later this week actually. 

[slayer93]

Sounds good, the problem will be educating people on it's use.  Which can be lot trickier than what it might sound.  Moreover, I'd be tempted to completely detect it from the sprites, andlet the use pick choose how they wish to represent the objects visually.

Yeah, probably the reason why not many people would use this yet is because there are no documentation to show them how to use it, I may work on writing up some docs before I add anything else. But I'm trying to make it as easy to use while also giving as much flexibility as possible.

   Can certainly see there being a huge need for some type character designer to go with it also, wouldn't have to be pretty.. Just so user can get something on screen and get familiar with the terminology .  Including me.   I was thinking about using this in a little retro remake later this week actually.

Would be interesting to make, also looking forward to your retro remake too ;).

[kevin]

Yeah, probably the reason why not many people would use this yet is because there are no documentation to show them how to use it, I may work on writing up some docs before I add anything else. But I'm trying to make it as easy to use while also giving as much flexibility as possible.

  Are their any (related such as the Dbpro one) Wiki's perhaps that could be used in the time being ?

Would be interesting to make, also looking forward to your retro remake too

   Tinkering with the idea of another Shamus remake, but running out of time.   The end of NOV is fast approaching and the news letter stuff will have to done a few days prior to the 30th.   

[slayer93]

  Are their any (related such as the Dbpro one) Wiki's perhaps that could be used in the time being ?

The only wiki I know of is the Box2D one but that is mostly on C++, Flash, etc. Nothing really basic but I suppose the general idea is there. Here is a link - http://box2d.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page. Although I may start up a wiki for Box2D on my website. At first I was going to make a few html docs because I'm probably going to write up the help files myself anyway, but maybe it would be easier to just look it up on a wiki and it would be much nicer looking. It doesn't matter to me either way but anyone have any sort of preference?

   Tinkering with the idea of another Shamus remake, but running out of time.   The end of NOV is fast approaching and the news letter stuff will have to done a few days prior to the 30th.

I'll be happy to help out with a newsletter article of Box2D. I could make a simple demo or two.

[kevin]

The only wiki I know of is the Box2D one but that is mostly on C++, Flash, etc. Nothing really basic but I suppose the general idea is there. Here is a link - http://box2d.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page. Although I may start up a wiki for Box2D on my website. At first I was going to make a few html docs because I'm probably going to write up the help files myself anyway, but maybe it would be easier to just look it up on a wiki and it would be much nicer looking. It doesn't matter to me either way but anyone have any sort of preference?

    A wiki would be cool, even although i'm not huge fan of them.  But they're prolly the best way to get such things done quickly though, that's assuming people are willing to help out.  Initially, I feel this is going to be a difficult sell.   People generally tend to sit back and wait, until somebody else does it for them :)

    Yeah.  doc's are a hard one.  The current PB help is in HTML, but it's not created by an editor, they're built with a custom (rough as guts) database tool.   You might be better going down this road yourself, then when we finalize the new PBDOC format, you could convert your data files across to Pb format,  then they'd can be plugged directly into the IDE.

I'll be happy to help out with a newsletter article of Box2D. I could make a simple demo or two.

    Go for it.  The deadline for the TGC stuff is generally 3 or 4 days before they publish it.  That one (the TGC news letter) is the most pressing thing in the short term,   So if you could slap a few paragraphs together on what it does, where your at. Sorta stuff, I'll just plug this into my monthly dribble.   

[slayer93]

A wiki would be cool, even although i'm not huge fan of them.  But they're prolly the best way to get such things done quickly though, that's assuming people are willing to help out.  Initially, I feel this is going to be a difficult sell.   People generally tend to sit back and wait, until somebody else does it for them Smiley

    Yeah.  doc's are a hard one.  The current PB help is in HTML, but it's not created by an editor, they're built with a custom (rough as guts) database tool.   You might be better going down this road yourself, then when we finalize the new PBDOC format, you could convert your data files across to Pb format,  then they'd can be plugged directly into the IDE.

Alright, I'll most likely be making it in html till your new format comes out.

Go for it.  The deadline for the TGC stuff is generally 3 or 4 days before they publish it.  That one (the TGC news letter) is the most pressing thing in the short term,   So if you could slap a few paragraphs together on what it does, where your at. Sorta stuff, I'll just plug this into my monthly dribble.   

Ok, great I'll send you an pm sometime this weekend then.

[kevin]

so what's the latest news ? :)

[slayer93]

Ahh, sorry Kevin I haven't been working on this to much. I've been working on another project of mine, but since I have a nice long vacation in front of me I'll be working on this.

[kevin]

    Well,  if you don't have time you should consider releasing the source so somebody else can continue it.

[slayer93]

Yeah sorry I haven't given any attention to this at all, although I didn't update it I didn't drop the project. But I think it would be better if I did released the source, although I must forewarn I really only started learning C++ this year and self taught so I guess I could of forgotten to do things or the way I did something looks strange.

For anyone wanting to continue, I stopped off on Contacts, it was suppose to add a message into the vector which could be read by PB and then discarded so PB could know about every contact and what to do about contacts. Without it really a lot of the things would be incomplete such as sensors.

I haven't given up on this project though, just made it open-source, I'll update it someday...before the next Ice Age hoepfully... :-\

I've put it on an SVN respository...

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[kevin]

Thanks for uploading the code. While  I downloaded it the other day, I haven't really had a good chance to have at it.  What compiler are using BTW ?

[slayer93]

I've been using Visual C++ Express 2008.

[slayer93]

Okay, I've started some work on this project. Sorry to everyone that wanted to use it :'(! I unfortunately have to many projects for my own good.

Anyway I figured out the problem with contacts and I found out it was extremely simple, I made a derived class to send the messages but used the original one (doesn't make any sense but even the smallest things get overlooked sometimes). Anyway I'm going to clean up my code and organize it before I release the next update. I'll see if I can get another demo out too.

@Kevin:

Sorry to bother you about a small matter, but PlayBasic doesn't seem to recognize some commands, it has been like that for a while but I just rem it out and moved on. Thought it might be time to figure it out.

If you still have the library on your comp than could you check it out. If you open up the PBBox2D.PBA (links the dll) you'll see some remed out commands and if you check the decorated name of the remed commands in the dll you'll see it is there. I can't figure out if this is something I overlooked or if PlayBasic can't see the command for some reason.

No problem if you don't want to check though. ;)

Thanks Kevin.

[kevin]

works here.