Main
Chipmunk

Screenshots:

Go to the screenshot gallery.

Videos:

• Sketches – An amazing work in progress made by a forum member. (forum thread)
• The Machine (youtube)
• Domino pyramid (youtube)
• Domino smash (youtube)
• More

Features:

• Designed for 2D video games.
• Circle, convex polygon, and line segment collision primitives.
• Multiple collision primitives can be attached to the same rigid body.
• Fast collision detection by using a spatial hash for the broad phase.
• Extremely fast impulse solving by utilizing Erin Catto’s contact persistence algorithm.
• Support for collision callbacks based on object types.
• Impulses applied to contact points can be retrieved after the impulse solver has finished.
• Several kinds of joints available.
• C99 implementation, no external dependencies.
• Ruby extension available.
• Simple, read the documentation.
• Unrestrictive MIT license.

Download:

Source + Demos

Tutorials:

• Moon buggy tutorial (XCode project)
  • Create a simple side scrolling vehicle game. (Complete with soft suspension!)
  • Shows basic Chipmunk usage including initialization and usage of joints.
• More to come

Community:

Chipmunk Forums at Slembcke.net

Testimonials

”I had been working on my own physics code for months, trying to make it as fast as possible – then I took 3 days to change out my setup for chipmunk and things improved considerably. Chipmunk is fast and easy, I recommend it.” – Derek Arndt (Biofilm)

Logos

Want to throw a logo on your splash screen to show how much you appreciate Chipmunk? Frank Condello was gracious enough to make a logo for me. A couple variations are available here.

SVN:

Chipmunk is currently hosted as a Google Code Project. Go there now.

Acknowledgments:

• Box2D:
  • Erin Catto’s Box2D code was the most useful reference that I used when creating Chipmunk. His contact persistence algorithm is the main reason why Chipmunk is so fast.
• Optimized Spatial Hashing for Collision Detection of Deformable Objects
  • The best article I could find on spatial hashing. Their hash function seems to perform very well.
• Nonconvex Rigid Bodies with Stacking
  • My previous implementation was based on this paper. I only implemented part of the algorithm before deciding that something simpler would be better suited for real time.
• Physics for Game Developers
  • This book is a good reference for a lot of the math you’ll need, but is far from a good reference on implementing a physics engine.

Logo by Frank Condello, Chipmunk sillouette by Kelvin Nishikawa