Rewritten Physics Engine Demo

Initial testing of ammo.js (a port of Bullet Physics to JavaScript using Emscripten) found some issues, but they have been quickly resolved. ammo.js should be ready for use now.

Completing that allowed me to rewrite the original Emscripten Bullet demo using ammo.js. That is, the original demo code - creating the scene and so forth - was written in C++, and was compiled alongside Bullet into JavaScript for the original demo. What I did now was to write the scene generating code in JavaScript, where it uses Bullet through ammo.js's autogenerated bindings. Check out the demo here, and read the JavaScript embedded in the HTML file to see a complete example of using ammo.js.

I'm very happy with the result: The JavaScript code in the demo is very nice to work with now, and in addition it outperforms the original demo due to build system improvements that were completed since the original demo was finished.

ammo.js - Ready for Testing!

After months of work, ammo.js (the Bullet physics engine compiled to JavaScript using Emscripten) is now ready for testing. To do that, grab builds/ammo.js, and look at examples/hello_world.js for a code example.

examples/hello_world.js is almost a 1 to 1 manual translation of HelloWorld.cpp (which you can find in bullet/Demos/HelloWorld/HelloWorld.cpp). That is possible since the ammo.js bindings let you write very natural JavaScript, for example this C++ code

btTransform groundTransform;
groundTransform.setIdentity();

becomes this JavaScript code

var groundTransform = new btTransform();

groundTransform.setIdentity();

There are some limitations to the automatically generated bindings code (see the ammo.js README for more details), but overall it basically works.

This is the result of a lot of hard work by bretthart on CppHeaderParser and by me on the bindings generator in Emscripten that uses it. Turns out it's pretty hard to automatically generate bindings from C++ to JavaScript, who would have thought ;) In any case we appear to have things in good shape now. I will probably write a separate blogpost about the bindings methodology later on.

The speed of ammo.js should be fairly decent, most optimizations are applied to the underlying Bullet code except for the LLVM ones and for typed arrays. However the binding code itself is not optimized at all yet. Overall things should be fast enough for testing, with some additional speedups still possible later on.

Please test ammo.js and file issues on github :)