Pymunk is a easy-to-use pythonic 2d physics library that can be used whenever you need 2d rigid body physics from Python. Perfect when you need 2d physics in your game, demo or simulation! It is built on top of the very capable 2d physics library Chipmunk.
The first version was released in 2007 and Pymunk is still actively developed and maintained today, more than 10 years of active development!
Pymunk has been used with success in many projects, big and small. For example: 3 Pyweek game competition winners, more than a dozen published scientific papers and even in a self-driving car simulation! See the Showcases section on the Pymunk webpage for some examples.
2007 - 2022, Victor Blomqvist - [email protected], MIT License
This release is based on the latest Pymunk release (6.2.1), using Chipmunk 7 rev 0593976ef47fcb3957166bd342f6b2bafe4d0e44 .
In the normal case pymunk can be installed from PyPI with pip:
> pip install pymunk
It has one direct dependency, CFFI.
Pymunk can also be installed with conda, from the conda-forge channel:
> conda install -c conda-forge pymunk
Quick code example:
import pymunk # Import pymunk..
space = pymunk.Space() # Create a Space which contain the simulation
space.gravity = 0,-981 # Set its gravity
body = pymunk.Body() # Create a Body
body.position = 50,100 # Set the position of the body
poly = pymunk.Poly.create_box(body) # Create a box shape and attach to body
poly.mass = 10 # Set the mass on the shape
space.add(body, poly) # Add both body and shape to the simulation
print_options = pymunk.SpaceDebugDrawOptions() # For easy printing
while True: # Infinite loop simulation
space.step(0.02) # Step the simulation one step forward
space.debug_draw(print_options) # Print the state of the simulation
For more detailed and advanced examples, take a look at the included demos (in examples/).
Examples are not included if you install with pip install pymunk. Instead you need to download the source archive (pymunk-x.y.z.zip). Download available from https://pypi.org/project/pymunk/#files
The source distribution of Pymunk ships with a number of demos of different simulations in the examples directory, and it also contains the full documentation including API reference.
You can also find the full documentation including examples and API reference on the Pymunk homepage, http://www.pymunk.org
"Make 2d physics easy to include in your game"
It is (or is striving to be):
- Easy to use - It should be easy to use, no complicated code should be needed to add physics to your game or program.
- "Pythonic" - It should not be visible that a c-library (Chipmunk) is in the bottom, it should feel like a Python library (no strange naming, OO, no memory handling and more)
- Simple to build & install - You shouldn't need to have a zillion of libraries installed to make it install, or do a lot of command line tricks.
- Multi-platform - Should work on both Windows, *nix and OSX.
- Non-intrusive - It should not put restrictions on how you structure your program and not force you to use a special game loop, it should be possible to use with other libraries like Pygame and Pyglet.
- Homepage
- http://www.pymunk.org/
- Stackoverflow
- You can ask questions/browse old ones at Stackoverflow, just look for the Pymunk tag. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/pymunk
- You can email me directly at [email protected]
- Issue Tracker
- Please use the issue tracker at github to report any issues you find: https://github.com/viblo/pymunk/issues
Regardless of the method you use I will try to answer your questions as soon as I see them. (And if you ask on SO other people might help as well!)
Basically Pymunk have been made to be as easy to install and distribute as possible, usually pip install will take care of everything for you.
- Python (Runs on CPython 3.6 and later and Pypy3)
- Chipmunk (Compiled library already included on common platforms)
- CFFI (will be installed automatically by Pip)
- Setuptools (should be included with Pip)
- GCC and friends (optional, you need it to compile Pymunk from source. On windows Visual Studio is required to compile)
- Pygame (optional, you need it to run the Pygame based demos)
- Pyglet (optional, you need it to run the Pyglet based demos)
- Matplotlib & Jupyter Notebook (optional, you need it to run the Matplotlib based demos)
- Sphinx & aafigure & sphinx_autodoc_typehints (optional, you need it to build documentation)
Support for Python 2 (and Python 3.0 - 3.5) has been dropped with Pymunk 6.0. If you use these legacy versions of Python, please use Pymunk 5.x.
This section is only required in case you do not install pymunk from the prebuild binary wheels (normally if you do not use pip install or you are on a uncommon platform).
Pymunk is built on top of the c library Chipmunk. It uses CFFI to interface with the Chipmunk library file. Because of this Chipmunk has to be compiled together with Pymunk as an extension module.
There are basically two options, either building it automatically as part of installation using for example Pip:
> pip install pymunk-source-dist.zip
Or if you have the source unpacked / you got Pymunk by cloning its git repo, you can explicitly tell Pymunk to compile it inplace:
> python setup.py build_ext --inplace