DesignWebKit

Papervision 3D Programming Tutorial – WOW Physics

Here you can learn how to add real time physics to the Papervision 3D using WOW physics engine. Until “Jurasic Park: Trespasser” was released most games didn’t implement any sort of physics. Times have changed though. Games like Half Life 2 make use of physics extensively as an integral part of the game play. Flash developers haven’t been left out in the cold as well. A physics engine called WOW gives Flash/Flex developers a taste of real time, 3D physics.

Though WOW Physics has several limitations, like only detecting collisions between spheres, or between a sphere and a plane – still, it does offer a promising glimpse of the future of real time Flash physics. WOW only does the physics calculations, and requires a 3D engine like Papervision 3D to actually render the result to the screen. However creating and syncing both engines does not involve a lot of work.

The following Papervision tutorial is pretty detailed, the result and source code are included.