Great stuff!

Only noticed a little wall-climbing effect when just missing the edge of a platform, but since I always hated the "impossible" jumps in platformers (those were you lose all your lives that you have been saving the last 3 levels, nostalgia mode) I don't really mind. It's fun to push boxes with actual physics instead of single orientation blocks.

An example I would like to see is a topdown sidescroller using physics to handle collisions (maybe not even tile-based). An artist would just be able to draw a scene, import it into the engine and point out the blocking parts. If you have a round pillar and you walk against it, you need to slide around and not stick to the point you collided with it. Add a button to toggle the visibility of the wireframe blocking physics.

Kev: Updated the platformer test to fix some of the niggles. Working on some docs atm.

Nice stuff! A couple comments and suggestions for what to tackle next.

- It's interesting that you ignore gravity entirely and basically apply it only if the player's in the air. This is one solution to the not-sliding-down-slope problem, but is this desirable behavior when slopes get steeper?

Now, for the stuff you could tackle next...

- Moving Platforms. The best test is to make one that moves along a closed path, like a circle / polygon with many sides.

- Ladders and Ropes. This should be rather interesting to handle.

- Jump through tiles.

- Water.

- Springboards.

- Add in an "enemy" actor.

- Destructible or dynamic terrain.

Kev: Thanks for the feedback. I'm not that interested in continuing, it's just an example for a couple of others. However, I'm sure they'll be interested in the ideas above.

As to the slopes, yeah, it's interesting one. I guess I'd take it on a game by game basis and tune for that.

Kev, awsome stuff. I took a look and decided to have a little go, got everything running ok and then started messing. Obviously, I wanted to do something which is not in the demo, so I tried a joint.....

maybe you can tell me where I`m going wrong as the 2 crates just fall to the floor unconnected.. thanks
:)

Entity b1 = new Crate(700,100,20,10,5);
env.addEntity(b1);
Entity b2 = new Crate(720,100,20,10,5);
env.addEntity(b2);
new FixedJoint(b1.getBody(),b2.getBody());
Vector2f anchor1=(Vector2f)b1.getBody().getPosition();
Vector2f anchor2=(Vector2f)b2.getBody().getPosition();
new DistanceJoint(b1.getBody(),b2.getBody(), anchor1, anchor2,20);

hope to hear from you soon, you never know, you might rekindle my desire to code :)

Kev: The joints need to be added to the physics world.

like another post i read tonight, something pops into my head soon as i post....

was it simply that i didnt add the joint to the environment?

Kev: Heh, yeah.

I've actually been working on a platformer using phys2D for the past 3 months, and yes, it's definitely an interesting situation, especially because I want the player to do an almost obscene number of actions, like clinging to ledges and doing blackflips and all kinds of other craziness. I have probably spent half the development time tweaking physics, and there's still a long way to go. But I'm confident to come up with something very cool.

http://www.javagaming.org/forums/index.php?topic=18491.0