A fast, easy to use, free, and community supported 2D game engine
Hi,
I found it extremely tedious to define the vertices of sprites for the Box2D or Chipmunk physics engines. Maybe I was just not using the right tool. So I wrote my own. It's called VertexHelper and it lets you graphically define vertices of sprites for Box2D and Chipmunk bodies/shapes.
Check it out here (with video): http://blog.springenwerk.com/2010/02/introducing-vertexhelper-for-box2d.html
Enjoy!
- Johannes Fahrenkrug
Hi Zenkimoto,
no, you can't edit/delete/save/load the shapes. I've put this together in a few hours and when I find time I might still add some more stuff. If you get around to it first, feel free to fork it and contribute :)
- Johannes
Nice!
I few things:
- Since Box2d and Chipmunk don't support concave polygons it would be great that tool warns you in case you are building a concave polygon.
- Also Box2d (I don't know about Chipmunk) doesn't support clock-wise polygons. You need to build counter-CW polygons, so it would be great that it warns you about it.
- and I think that the tool is using ccp to build Chipmunks vertices. Although it works, it should use cpv.
What would be really sweet is to see this functionality rolled into the Zwoptex tool and allow this data to be stored in the plist definition for each sprite. Then with a few helper functions, you could easily initialize sprites off a sprite sheet and create their physics representations.
Hi Riq,
Thank you for your ideas. You know, I've actually thought of adding those features, too. But as always, time is the issue. I just needed a tool to make this quicker and easier for a current project I'm working on and thought it would be good to open source it since others must have the same problem.
In it's current state it does exactly what I need it to do. But I'll try to add more features to it one day. Maybe someone will fork it on github and add some more features :)
I have corrected the ccp thing, though!
@slipster: what exactly does Zwoptex do? is it open source?
- Johannes
@jfahrenkrug Zwoptex helps build atlas sprite sheets by stitching together independent sprite images and writing out a .plist with the sprite assignment that can be loaded into cocos2d.
It's open source, and your tool just feels like it would be ideally suited to working as a nice feature of Zwoptex (even if it didn't export the vertices).
This is still awesome, though, and even if it's not part of Zwoptex, this will still be hugely useful for me. Thank you.
Hi Andy,
Thanks for the info on Zwoptex. I have tried it and it seems to be very useful as well.
Actually, what I would like VertexHelper to do one day is to automatically detect the vertices: Most of the time, the sprites will have a transparent background. So it should be possible to detect the edges and the vertices....
I'll look into it :) Any help is appreciated :)
- Johannes
Thank you, Sama7. We'll keep in touch!
- Johannes
Questor
Member
jfahrenkrug,
Very cool tool. However, I think I may have found an issue...
I loaded a 1024x1024 image and tried dividing it up into 32 rows and 32 cols... unfortunately it did not seem to be able to layout a grid of that size. It seemed like the max number of rows and cols it can handle was 20x20.
I tried a couple of different 1024x1024 textures but had the same result.
Granted, I can just cut up the image to use the vertex tool, but I thought you'd want to know about the issue.
Best Regards,
Q
Looks ok...could you share a binary?
Questor
Member
festival,
I realize you asked about a binary, but this should work even better since you can make mods and rebuild if need be.
If you look at the github project page there is a link called "Download Source" in the upper right. Just click on that and pick zip or tar and it will download the complete project (you do not need to have git to do this). Then all you need to do is open the .xcodeproj file with Xcode and do a Build&Go/Build&Debug.
Hope this helps,
Q
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