Two years ago I began working on my master thesis, a simple 2D physics sandbox. About half a year later, on February 13 last year, I proudly released a public version of the application, Phun beta 2.3. My plan was to iron out the last bugs and a in a few weeks release 1.0, thereby finishing my work on Phun. As you all know, this was not to be. As I looked on in amazement as thousands of people downloaded the program each day I realized Phun was special, and I couldn't bring myself to stop working on it. However, bills had to be paid, and the generous student loans of Sweden are only paid to those who study. Luckily, I was not alone in realizing the potential of Phun. My thesis supervisor, Kenneth, saw the Phun phenomenon grow, and offered me a job at his company Algoryx to develop Phun into a commercial project.

It took us longer than we had thought, but today Phun has finally grown up to become Algodoo! So I welcome you to go to our brand new website at http://www.algodoo.com and download the demo, to get a hands on with Algodoo!

The new website also has a new forum, and since we have been growing tired of the backend of this forum (punBB) we have decided to base the new forum on the (in our eyes) superior phpBB, which has far greater potential for new plugins and mods. This, however, means we cannot simply move the old forum (this forum) to www.algodoo.com, and since we don't want to be administrating two forums about the same things (yes, of course you can discuss Phun at the Algodoo forums!) we have decided to make the move the hard way: have a clean slate forum at http://www.algodoo.com/forum and then, in a short while, freeze this forum. This means you have to re-register a user on the new forum. We hope this won't cause too much trouble for you, but we really do think this will be the best thing to do in the long run. Once registered on the new forum, a special offer should become visible to you...

So in summary, go to www.algodoo.com and stay there!


- Emil Ernerfeldt, and the rest of the Algodoo team




Full change log from Phun to Algodoo:

=== Algodoo 1.6.0 ===
New features:
* Lasers  -  they can refract, reflect and even cut
* Plots/graphs  -  explore everything from energy conservation to harmonic oscillators
* Web camera support  -  get real world objects into Algodoo easily
* Generation of geometry from semi-transparent textures
* Visualization of forces and velocities
* Grid, with optional snapping and custom number of axes (make squares as well as hexagons)
* Velocity menu  -  set precise velocities for selected objects
* Incompressible fluids  -  a far better fluid simulation using a completely novel method (switch to old behavior in the options menu)
* A texture tool to move, rotate and scale textures
* A startup check for updates (can be disabled in options)
* The ability to turn a circle into a protractor
* Support for the accelerometer of the Intel Powered Convertible Classmate PC

Changed behavior:
* Everything in Algodoo is now saved to the user home directory (e.g. My Documents/Algodoo on Windows). Nothing is ever written to the installation folder.
* Constrained Algodoo to one instance at the time. Opening a scene file will open it in the previous instance
* Changed spring behavior slightly to make it conserve energy better. The old behavior is available by setting legacyMode=0 in the script menu. This is done automatically for springs imported from old Phun scenes.
* Spring strength is now entered as standard spring constant (unit N/m)
* When scaling a geometry, any attachments are now kept on the same world coordinate
* The hinge tool can now separate glued geometries. This means that when used together with the brush tool, creating rag dolls etc is very fast.
* cut tool now deletes FixJoints
* Hinge motor is now unchecked if the user selects a key controller for it instead
* Made camera zoom resolution independent.
* Changed drag tool behavior: When failing to drag a static geometry, nothing will now happen
* Added limitation of only calling "onCollide" for one contact per geometry pair per time step
* Disabled water vaporization (re-enable with "SPH.vaporizeTime = 5")
* When moving a stretched hinge, the hinge will now connect at its center instead of at its old stretched coordinates
* Changed the pan button pan direction to correspond to "normal" mouse panning
* Undo:
** Changed undo behavior: when undoing with no previous redo, an extra snapshot will be added to the redo-list, so one can go back to the future.
** Several subsequent drags, moves and slider modifications are now combined into one undo
** Added smart enforcing of "App.maxUndo": low priority actions (like drag) are removed first from the undo list.
** When undoing, the position of the clouds are now also undone

UI changes:
* Better load scene menu:
** Added a full path text field
** Added a file filter
** Added the ability to sort file list by date
** Changed color of directories
* Added the ability to reset the Algodoo configuration (useful for when playing to much with scripting)
* Box text settings are now hidden if there is no box text
* Made simple mode even simpler (less buttons)
* Clicking twice on the "show widget objects" button (the eye) returns you to the old view
* Better alignment of digits in entity information widget.
* Fixed slightly nicer printing of floats
* Text editing: double click now selects a word while triple click selects an entire line in textboxes
* Added welcome text when running Algodoo the first time
* Sliders: if marked objects have different values, the sliders will now show the range of different values instead of "NaN".
* Added the ability to freeze water
* Improved entity information
* Changed some icons
* Added the ability to shift the selected collision group of selected objects
* GUI windows now fade out temporarily when using a tool in their vicinity
* Added translations of the simulation info
* Turned off the custom cursors per default (due to performance issues).
* Moved help and about buttons to the file menu
* Added scale tool labels showing the current scale factors
* Increased clickable area of button selector (hinge and laser control)

Visual changes:
* Added a fade in effect when loading a scene (eye candy)
* Made the default sky color brighter to better distinguish it from the water color
* Added better color cues to make it easier to spot what a hinge or spring is attach to
* Added cute clouds - similar to the 16-bit clouds. Turn off in background menu in advanced mode.
* Better looking borders
* The geometry border width is now limited by a fraction of the geometry area (controlled by App.maxBorderArea)
* Better looking polygons
* Selected objects now always have a white border round them, even if textured.

Improvements:
* Improved spring tool to connect to top two geometries (so you can now connect objects that fully covers each other)
* Added preview to polygon tool, and changed polygon tool to close polygons more often
* Improved spring tool to connect to top two geometries (so you can now connect objects that fully covers each other)
* Bound together color sliders: changing one updates others bound to the same object
* Added the ability to disband a tool by shaking the mouse violently. Set the sensitivity by App.GUI.toolGestureSensitivity. Turn off with App.GUI.toolGestures
* Solved some instances of deeply penetrating objects getting stuck inside each other
* Lowered Sim.targetPenetration to make most constraints more stiff
* Improved the Polygon-Circle collision detection code to get better normals and fewer contact points
* Slightly improved distance maps for small polygons and for long, thin polygons
* The English tool-tip will now be used when a tool-tip translation is missing
* Slightly improved gearification
* Added support for right-to-left languages (e.g. Arabic). See English translation file for details

Windows specific:
* Removed the ugly console window
* Algodoo will now restore to maximized window if it was running as such the last time
* Changed full screen mode to fake full screen mode to fix issues with touch-screens and other alternative input devices
* The installer will now prompt you to close Algodoo if it's running

Advanced:
* Added variable information (where available) when entering name of a variable in the console
* Added the ability to create conveyor belts through the script variable "materialVelocity" (experimental feautre)
* Added command System.regularScreenshots for taking a screenshot every N:th simulation step
* Added new Thyme meta function "eval": Example code:  eval("bar:=1; foo:={bar=bar+1;}; foo*eval(\"foo\")");
* Added Thyme type conversion functions: math.toBool, math.toInt, math.toFloat and math.toString.
* Added console command App.forceVertexPolygonDrawing - set to true to get a more accurate, but slower, rendering of polygons. Will also save video memory.
* Removed the writing of Unlogged.txt

Bug fixes:
* Fixed a lot of problems regarding gluing and fixates
** Fixed a problem where objects that had never been explicitly glued would still still stick together if previously attached to it via fixates
** Fixed a bug that would cause problems when trying to loosen a group of geometries containing a plane
** Fixed an issue with incorrectly reconnected FixJoints after scaling, moving or cloning
** Fixed a bug concerning the transformation of FixJoints
** Fixed a problem where geometries glued together would sometimes come appart when moved/rotated/mirrored
** Fixed a problem where moving a geometry would strangely move fixates attached to it
** Fixed a problem where glued objects would not come loose if a geometry connecting them was removed
* Fixed a problem where Ctrl-C could stop working on windows
* Fixed a problem where a scene could fail to save but would not give an error message
* Fixed borders from growing while modifying a polygon with brush tool
* Fixed problems with the chain tool that caused it to attach to the wrong geometries
* Fixed unit of hinge impulse (Nm to Ns)
* Improved CSG, brush and cut tool
* Fixed a bug that would make water particles disappear on undo
* Fixed a problem where importing a Phunlet would affect old objects
* Fixed several bugs regarding the serialization of groups
* Made the background colors of the color sliders more accurate
* Fixed a bug that would sometimes allow transformed (moved/rotated) joints to attach to something new in the transformed group
* Fixed a bug that prevented very small polygons from being loaded or created
* Fixed a bug that would prevent files from being saved in subdirectories (i.e. saving to "foo/bar" will now save the file to "My Documents/Algodoo/scenes/foo/bar.phz")
* Fixed a bug that caused App.maxSPHSpawn to be ignored
* Fixed a bug that would sometimes incorrectly separate geometries upon undo
* Fixed hinges from jerking when modifying a polygon
* Fixed a graphics glitch concerning the borders of scaled polygons
* Fixed an issue with the undo/redo buttons
* Fixed a bug that regarding cloning of things with "onCollide":s
* Fixed a bug that would sometimes cause "onCollide" to be called for geometries that had been removed from the simulation during the same time step
* Collision detection:
** Solved several problems that caused instabilities in box-box contacts
** Fixed a small bug with the circle-circle collision detection (singularity issue with perfectly aligned centers)
* Cables:
** Fixed a problem with cables that caused attached objects to act jumpy
** Fixed a bug concerning cables that could cause hinged objects to rotate when they shouldn't
* Fixed a bug that caused drift in object positions and rotation when moving, rotating undoing or loading
* Fixed a rare problem with attraction between geometries of the same body
* Fixed a small energy glitch (source)
* Fixed a bug that could cause a crash when objects had a non-positive mass
* Fixed a bug that would cause objects of the same body to collide

Optimizations:
* Serious optimization of core physics engine (almost twice as fast in some cases!)
* Added polygon contact reduction (will speed up any scene with many flat-sided polygons)
* Optimized broad-phase collision detection by a factor 2 (most noticeable when cloning or moving many objects, e.g. water)
* Optimized broad-phase for any scene containing lots of polygons
* Optimized scene loading
* Optimized Thyme parsing
* Optimized memory usage: undo snapshots now take up about 50% less RAM
* Optimized rendering with shaders by about 8x.
* Optimized moving and rotating objects slightly
* Many small optimizations