What is Chipmunk2D?

First of all, Chipmunk2D is a 2D rigid body physics library distributed under the MIT license. It is intended to be fast, portable, numerically stable, and easy to use. For this reason it's been used in hundreds of games across every recent system you can name. I've put thousands of hours of work over many years to make Chipmunk2D what it is today. I hope you enjoy working with it!

Chipmunk2D Pro builds on what we've made with C Chipmunk2D and extended it with more features, platform specific performance tuning, and new features. Currently we offer a Objective-C binding, ARM NEON optimizations for mobile CPUs, and a very high performance and flexible automatic geometry library.

Objective-Chipmunk for iPhone/Mac provides extended APIs and a first rate Objective-C wrapper with support for properties, blocks and ARC (automatic reference counting) to make Chipmunk2D coding more efficient with your time on Apple platforms.

The ARM optimizations use the NEON SIMD coprocessor found in any smartphone using an ARM Cortex A* CPU including all iOS hardware since the 3GS and many Android phones.

The auto geometry library can generate geometry from bitmap images or procedural data. You can use it for generating convex hull shapes from sprites, or create an entire level's collision shapes from a background image. It can also be easily set up to be used for high-performance deformable terrain or infinite procedural terrain.

If you'd like to hear more about Chipmunk2D Pro or download a trial library check out the Chipmunk2D Pro page.

Where do I start?

You might want to start by looking at some sample code. From there, you probably want to skim over the latest documentation. While geared towards C developers, it introduces all the important building blocks. The Objective-C API simply takes things to the next logical step.

Note:

These Doxygen docs cover both the C Chipmunk2D API as well as Objective-Chipmunk. The Objective-Chipmunk classes (Chipmunk*) are not available except with Chipmunk2D Pro.