Starframe's rope physics is the first piece of physics code I've written that I designed entirely myself. This is a short story of that design process and the challenges and solutions found along the way.

The Starframe physics solver has gone through a few iterations recently as my understanding of the problem and knowledge of available methods have grown. In this post I attempt to explain what constraints are and detail a few game-engine-friendly ways of solving them. I'll try to make this understandable to someone with approximately the level of knowledge I had before starting this: decent linear algebra and calculus skills and a tiny bit of physics knowledge.

I've spent a large portion of the past two years writing and rewriting the basic structures that describe a game and its content in Starframe (formerly known as MoleEngine). These are some notes on what I've done so far and what I've learned from it.

Starframe is an ambitious hobby project, still early on in development, aiming to create a general-purpose 2D game engine suitable for rapid prototyping and game jams as well as more polished, hopefully commercial-quality products. This blog is meant to document the development and ideas behind it in a fair bit of detail - mostly to organize and revise my own thoughts, but with the hope that someone else might also find it interesting and/or helpful. In this first post I will outline what exactly I am trying to accomplish and why I am doing it.