The Fisix Engine

Was a bit late getting it out because the server here is giving me too much trouble, but you can now play around with the Fisix Engine all you want! Download it over at http://www.fisixengine.com

The time has come for a release, and that time is Thursday Dec. 14, 2006. The download will be available on the site www.fisixengine.com.

So are you all as excited as I am about this release? I haven’t been able to work on this as much as I want to lately, but I have managed to put together the official Fisix Manual, now I just need to type it up. Still got one or two tutorials to put together, and more will follow later, so it looks like the Fisix Engine will be released just in time for the holidays with high anticipation, much like the Playstation 3 and the new Tickle me elmo extreme

All efforts are being made here to get it out as soon as possible, so bare with me and your patience will pay off (hohpefully )

No public release yet, but we are so close…

I, along with several flash devs have begun to write tutorials for the engine

It is now only a matter of weeks, even days until you can get your hands on it!

cheers!

I just read this article which describes how to create dynamic sounds with flash, but there was one part within it which says you can load class definitions from an external .swf file. Right away I booted up flash 9 and began to experiment. It is indeed possible to use the FisixEngine library (or any other library) with flash 9 preview, but it’s a bit weird for the following reasons:

- you have to load an external swf, so the engine code isn’t compiled with your application (unlike it would be in flex). This is both good and bad…

- for that reason you also can’t write this code:

   var v:Vector = new Vector(0,0)

because the type Vector is loaded externally, and isn’t defined at compile-time.

Instead you’d just write:

var v = new Vector(0,0)

or even

var v:Object = new Vector(0,0)

Yesterday I finally finished the API docs for the library. I am very excited that the release date seems so near, but there are still a few things to get done on my side before you can have your hands on it.
The first thing to do now is write a short manual. Then I’ll start to write some tutorials with the help of a few flash gurus from around the web who also wanted to help.

The reason that good documentation is so important to me is that its really what makes or breaks the engine. A lot of time and effort was put into making the engine easy to use and as intuitive as possible, but if there are no good docs, most people won’t even know where to start, which will make the engine useless
If you’d like to peek around the api, here’s the link

http://www.fisixengine.com/docs/api

I have to say I’m very excited. Two donations in one week! Thank you Steven Hargrove for your donation to this project.

All I can say about the release now, is that it’s approaching closer with every day that passes So if i’m not posting anything…. it might be a good sign.

Let me also take this chance to explain the latest feature that was added… and perhaps tell you a bit about the structure of the engine

So to start, everything in the engine is built around the FisixObject class which in essence is a way of grouping physical (and non physical) objects. A FisixObject has no explicit position or rotation because it’s a group of other objects. Its primary use is to help the engine with collision detection, and also to divide the simulation up into logical slices. So, for example, a car in your game would be a FisixObject. inside that car, you might have another FisixObject for the body, and two wheels. The terrain might be another FisixObject, which you would set to static to preserve processing power, as it never moves. You can make it as complex or simple as you like. You can then also specify a material to all the objects in the FisixObject, or for each one seperately. You can also disable collision checking between everything inside that object, and a lot of other things you’ll see once it comes out

Now, the new feature is that you can make your object Axis Aligned. It’s as simple as FisixObject.axisAligned = true, but it’s very helpful when you want to make something where the objects within the group won’t move independently of eachother… or in other if you need your object to be rigid. For example, let’s say you want to have a character walking on some terrain. You could use a lot of constraints to keep the character where you want it, but it’s a lot easier (and cheaper) to make it axis aligned so that all the particles within the character move as if they are part of a rigid body which never rotates (although the object won’t rotate from a collision, it can be rotated manually). So when axisAligned is set to true, the constraints in the FisixObject don’t really make a difference anymore because all the objects will always have the same distance from eachother anyway. This way you can even animate all of the particles of the character to move along with its animated limbs… but it’s probably not necessary for a nice effect. I’ll try to post an example of this soon, but hopefully it will all be in the documentation along with the library

First off, let me thank Andrew Langley for his donation to this project. The third donor but no release yet

Now, here’s what’s happening with the engine. Been a bit busy lately, but I’m clearing more time to work on the engine. I added one last feature (axis aligned objects) which I won’t go into detail about now, but I’ll just say it is very usefull for games. I promise no more new features just writing api docs, getting some tutorials written, and finally releasing this monster

She’s witty, charming, attractive, and she has a great smile. and did I mention flexible? Meet Mona, the new mascot for the FisixEngine. Rigid and soft bodies are combined in this demo to make the perfect woman.

I promised a ragdoll demo, so here it is: Meet Mona

Everyone’s making biking games, so I decided to see how the Fisix engine could handle one too–well, you can see for yourself. It actually took me only a few hours to make this game, but the thing that took up most of my time was making the fractal terrain. Now I have all the algorithms written up, so I’ll just throw it into the engine as a helper class

Play the game here