Physics

Airplay SDK doesn't provide a bespoke high-level physics engine. Surely there are enough good ones out there already? Rather, we provide you with the low-level geometry building blocks, and let you choose from existing high-level engines, either open source or proprietary.

Rich geometry building blocks

Airplay's geometry module provides all the core primitives you need for physics and other types of 3D calculations. However, rather than just providing one type of each primitive (for example, a 3-cpt floating point vector), we've provided every flavour you can imagine. So you'll find vectors as 2-cpt, 3-cpt and 4-cpt, in 16-bit fixed-point, 32-bit fixed-point, and floating point; similarly you'll find matrices, quaternions, spheres, planes and axis-aligned bounding, all in multiple flavours. All primitives are C++ objects, with operator overloads providing easy access to the maths.

Don't reinvent the wheels

Airplay's great support for standard C and C++ libraries means that existing open source or proprietary physics engines will compile with little or no modifications. To get you started, we provide the latest version of the Open Dynamics Engine, all ready to drop straight into your Airplay application. Simply include "ode" as a subproject in your Airplay project file, and it will get pulled down from our website automatically. (For more details of how this works, see Open Source)