So, I’ve been hard at work, and here’s what I’ve done. First off, on campus, Dr. Liow REALLY wanted me to do a python project. Why? Because in some strange way it made me a freeloader to hang around in a club where the point was messing with python without actually doing Python. I was really just there to talk to other people, mostly students there. So, what I did to make him happy, was Python bindings for my physics engine and a small demo. YAY! Here are some shots of knocking over a tower. Remember, running in Python, but using my physics engine, which as you probably know is in C. Check this shit:
oh, yeah, it's a tower
let's get ready to rumble, bitches!
steady now...
we're down, son!
It wasn’t that hard. I used SWIG based on the apparently valid opinions on it from this guy and this guy. I was really pleased with the results! 🙂 The one thing I had trouble coming to terms with though, was callbacks. I have world_something_callback(rat_world *world,whateverargs) calls, and setting up a callback system was hard and ultimately something I failed at. Here’s why:
I have a function used to set the callback: rat_world_set_body_left_world_callback(rat_world *world,body_left_world_callback *cb). What I wanted to do was pass a C function that could call a python callable object and convert the arguments properly. The store the PyObject somewhere I could get back to it. All went according to plan, until I tried to set up the arguments. I found I simply didn’t know how I could convert the C (rat_world *) pointer in to the PyObject rat_world class set up by SWIG. No matter how I diced it, I just couldn’t find a way to pull the whole thing together. I messed with the idea of SWIG_NewPointerObj, but even with that external runtime header, I could access the type information, because it only defined functions. Still, the rest of it looks fine. I’ll be in touch. And on the C front, I’ve fixed all that sloppy inlining and some really major memory problems with constraints. So, back to work.
Bye. :3
