Farseer Physics Engine + TestBed Port to MonoGame 3.6

Hey com!

Just wanted to notify you that I portet the original TestBed of the Farseer Physics Engine to MonoGame 3.6 and I made it available on GitHub.

Included is the source of the Farseer Physics Engine and the DebugView, which you can use separately in your MonoGame 3.6 project.

It’s nothing big but maybe this is helpful for someone who is struggeling with it :wink:

Cheers.

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I’ve downloaded and tried it out, I haven’t worked with Farseer before and it’s pretty impressive how powerful it is.

The samples are all cool as hell, though the program crashed on some occasions for me, plus some samples need better descriptions and in the deformable terrain one it says to use g / h to change circle size, when it uses g / f in fact (stuff like that).

Regardless this really makes me wanna do small physics games. I wonder if the performance can be improved, however. It’s weird to think that Farseer is super old, but I cannot run the “Tumbler” for example without the program coming to a crawl with complete loss of input. I might take the time and change the physics update to run as async code or on a synced different thread, since I think that’s useful for anyone making a game.

So yeah, the typical physics issues. Regardless, thank you for porting this amazing library of samples :slight_smile:

On a different note - the current version of VelcroPhysics (Farseer continuation project) offers a monogame version, too, right? Why not just use the current one? (In my case because the solution requires VS2017, which I don’t feel like installing for a single solution)

Hey kosmonaut!

Thanks for your input and trying things out.

I made a quick hotfix. The controls string should now show the correct keys for the destructible terrain sample. Thanks for pointing that out. I changed the original keys from ‘g’ & ‘h’ to ‘g’ & ‘f’ because I used the ‘h’ key to make the advanced control help hideable. This advanced control help wasn’t in the original TestBed of Farseer Physics. I decided to put that in, because it would be difficult to control the samples without taking a look into the code and find everything out by yourself. I just forgot to update this changes in the draw string.

Yes the farseer physics engine is an old library and it needs further work to be faster in some cases, like in the tumbler sample. It’s good that this project now continues as “Velcro Physics”.

I didn’t realised that the velcro physics repo contained the original testbed. And so far I didn’t take a deeper look into this repo.

You mean that the velcro physics solution requires visual studio 2017?

Then my repo is at least useful for people with just visual studio 2015 installed (like me), hehe. I’m on different projects myself using the old farseer physics engine and thought it would be nice to have the TestBed portet so I can learn from its samples on my new Windows 10 machine with visual studio 2015. The old farseer physics engine (including the TestBed) was not running in Visual Studio 2015 and I think it wasnt’ runing in the 2013 version too. This was the original reason for me to port this project. Its easier to have one working solution than switching the machines all the time, hehe :wink:

All this happend in a time where the Codeplex site announced his shuttingdown, which, I think, was kind of a reason for continueing the work on the farseer physics engine on github using the new name VelcroPhysics.

So, yeah, if you want to be up to date with the physics engine you should use the Velcro Physics Engine or at least if you want to help developing it further, you should place your commits there :slight_smile: My repo will just be useful for people like in my situation I think.

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