LÖVE

Hello,

I've come to LOVE through wanting to create some little games and so far I am enjoying the engine. I'm creating a platformer and want to know how I can use box2D for gravity and jumping but to have no friction or rotational velocity when trying to move the character sideways as he walks. The problems I have encountered when trying to use a rectangle body shape for my character's bounding box is that it has friction with the ground and falls over if i try to apply a sideways force. What is the best way to move my character along the floor? The best solution I've come up with so far is to use a circular body shape, but that will mean: a) the bounding box is the wrong shape, and b) if he's ever stood on a sloping floor he will roll down it.

Any hints you can give me will be very welcome,
Thankyou.

My solution: set the friction of the character to 0 and create a custom friction function. If you find that too complicated, you could also try setting the character's centre of gravity lower to the ground. I've had decent results with a combination of the two. In the end it all depends on what kind of range of motion you want your character to have.

Probably the best solution would be Box2D's Body.FixedRotation flag, which is not yet implemented in LOVE.

http://www.box2d.org/wiki/index.php?title=B2BodyDef

Until then, I'm not sure either. Setting the Player's Body's Angle to 0 every update sorta works, but has some over lap issues. ( body:setAngle(0) )

http://love2d.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=381

I, personally, would prefer to do custom-programmed physics. They're not too hard in ordinary platformers, and physics engines may or may not be a bit iffy.