I have decided to give some response to some of the most common suggestions that gets repeated over and over again here and elsewhere.

First of all, let me give you the immediate plan for Phun: first, I'm going to complete beta 4.0 for release sometime this month. After that I will be designing a completely new physics engine to replace the current one. Once the new engine is done I will start thinking more about user interface and features again. Anyway, here are some common suggestions (in no particular order):


* Magnetic, electric and gravitational body-to-body forces: Probably gonna add some support for at least one of these. It certainly would be useful to create stuff like magnetic locks that can be triggered (see separate point)

* Water: The water in Phun has a lot of weaknesses - it is slow and it compresses easily. This will be improved upon greatly in the new physics engine.

* Air pressure: Phun has an infinite amount of air, and simulating that is just very very hard. What probably will be added in Phun (once the new physics engine is done) is support of multiple liquids and gasses. This way you can fill up a confined space with a pressurized gas and then have it act on the liquids and bodies in that space.

* Soft/breakable objects: Will need a lot of work, but I really want this feature in Phun, so expect it at some (distant) point in time.

* Ropes, non-streching chains etc: Will be there when the new physics engine is complete

* Fire! Combustion! Explosions! - I'm actually not very fond of this idea since I think it rhymes badly with the Phun concept. But once the new physics engine is done and we have support for multiple liquids and gases - maybe I'll add a feature that lets liquids burn and create hot gasses or something of the sort. Maybe.

* Sand: I won't add sand as a primitive in Phun; but I will try to optimize the code so you can simulate sand by having a lot of small bodies.

* Video export: Using an external video application to capture video of Phun is a bit cumbersome, so I'll probably add a video recording feature to Phun. It would be especially useful to those of you who use Phun as an animation tool. Maybe I'll combine video recording with a demo recording feature of some sort.

* Sound: Although I don't see sound as a top priority, it would certainly make Phun more fun, so I will add it in the not-too-distant future.

* Better user interface: The user interface will definitely be improved upon in coming betas. I want Phun to be easy to use and learn, even for young children.

* More layers, better layer control etc: Useful stuff, and will certainly be added to Phun soon

* Snap-to-grid, object alignment etc: Will probably be added some time in the near future (since it's a pretty simple thing to add). Although it would be useful for creating exact machines etc, I fear it would also make Phun loose some of its "sketch" appeal...

* Input: More input options (for controlling hinges etc) will be available in the next beta

* Scale tool, mirror/flip-tool etc: Coming soon...

* Triggers: Will be added some time in the future. I'd like to create a visual programming language for this, since most people aren't that keen on learning a scripting language to do stuff. Exactly how this will be done is yet to be decided.

* Subtracting, splitting and otherwise modifying and combining shapes: Although it will take a lot of work, I am planning to add full constructive solid geometry to Phun.

* More advanced polygon tool (spline creation etc): This has a pretty low priority for me. Although useful for the artists within the Phun community, such a tool would probably be too advanced for most users anyway. For now you'll have to create things in other applications and import them into Phun.

There you go. Of course there a lot more suggestions out there, but they're just too many to address them all.

The suggestion forum isn't really working as well as I had hoped. Maybe we should concentrate on expanding the suggestion wiki instead?