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The Physics Abstraction Layer (PAL) provides a single unified interface to multiple physics engines. PAL is free software, released under the BSD license.

PAL makes physics development FLEXIBLE, FAST and EASY.

Contents 1 Features 2 Getting Started 2.1 Getting PAL 2.2 Getting a physics engine 2.3 Configure and build 3 Supported engines 4 Supported physics formats 5 See Also 5.1 Wiki Help

Features

PAL supports and provides a number of features for each physics engine:

• Collision System - For ray casting, contact detection etc.
• Solver System - For hardware acceleration and multi threading
• Rigid Bodies - For representing everyday objects, including static (fixed) objects such as terrain, dynamic (moving) objects such as a ragdoll and kinetic objects such as a game player
• Soft Bodies - For representing cloth and deformable bodies
• Fluids - For representing liquids, including direct and grid/heightmap based approaches for large bodies of water, and particle (SPH) approaches for splashes
• Sensors - For robotics applications, such as Inclinometers, Sonars, PSDs, and Transponders
• Actuators - Motors, Servos (PID) and more.
• Vehicles

PAL also provides a number of geometries (shapes) and constraints (links).

Getting Started

Check the PAL web site for more information.

Getting PAL

The best way to get PAL is directly from the sourceforge development SVN. This will keep you up to date with the latest version of PAL. See PAL SVN.

Alternatively, if you prefer not to use Subversion then you can download a nightly tarball from sourceforge or a tar.gz from the main PAL webpage.

You can extract PAL from these archives using programs such as tar, gzip and 7-zip

Getting a physics engine

PAL supports multiple physics engines. Direct links to physics engine downloads are provided at the Physics Engine Downloads link.

Configure and build

CMake is currently the recommended method to build PAL. See the Build page for further information.

You may wish to start with the Building PAL with CMake Tutorial

Supported engines

PAL supports multiple physics engines, including:

• Box2D
• Bullet
• Havok
• IBDS
• JigLib
• Newton Game Dynamics
• Open Dynamics Engine
• OpenTissue
• PhysX (formerly NovodeX and incorporating Meqon)
• Simple Physics Engine
• Tokamak
• TrueAxis

PAL has deprecated support for:

• Dynamechs
• Meqon

Supported physics formats

PAL supports loading COLLADA files and Scythe files. You may wish to refer to the tutorials on creating Physics with Digital Content Creation Packages

See Also

• PAL at Wikipedia
• PAL web site
• PAL publications

Wiki Help

Consult the User's Guide for information on using the wiki software.

• Configuration settings list
• MediaWiki FAQ
• MediaWiki release mailing list