Emanuele Feronato

Talking about Actionscript 3, Box2D, Flash and Game development.

You know with Box2D you can make interesting games like Mazeroll, SamePhysics or Filler, but even if I published a Box2D tutorial for absolute beginners, everyday I am receiving emails complaining about the excessive complexity of this library.

If you are looking for a library able to simplify your Box2D projects, Zevan Rosser from ActionSnippet developed a library called QuickBox2D that promises to significantly simplify instantiation of rigid bodies and provide a simple way to skin rigid bodies with custom graphics.

In this quick example I am going to add a sphere to the stage and make it draggable.

Before looking at this script, take a look at Dragging objects with Box2D Flash to see how many lines of code I needed to make those crates draggable.

This is what you need with QuickBox2D:

package {
	import flash.display.MovieClip;
	// importing required library
	import com.actionsnippet.qbox.*;
	// it must be a MovieClip!! With a Sprite it won't work!
	public class quickbox extends MovieClip {
		public function quickbox() {
			// setting up the QuickBox2D world
			var qb:QuickBox2D=new QuickBox2D(this);
			// default fill color
			qb.setDefault({lineAlpha:0, fillColor:0xff0000});
			// automatic stage walls creation!!!!!!!
			qb.createStageWalls();
			// adding a ball... that easy...
			var ball:QuickObject=qb.addCircle({x:3,y:3,restitution:0.9,lineAlpha:1,fillColor:0x00ff00,allowSleep:false,fixedRotation:true});
			// automatic mouse dragging!!!
			qb.mouseDrag();
			// starting the simulation
			qb.start();
		}
	}
}

and this is what you get…

And this is the source code with all libraries in the correct path.