Is physics simulation easy in Flash?

Ok, I’m not asking how to do physics simulations or anything, I’m just asking if they’re easy to do in Flash. There are all kinds of physics related toys that are made in Flash. A lot of the games I see seem to have more physics then indie games written in other languages. Does Flash come equipped with tools to help in physics simulation or are Flash programmers just more drawn to it for some reason? Also, am I the only one who notices this type of thing?

-Gunder

The reason I’m drawn to making physics in Flash is that I can see the immediate effects of the code. In other words, Flash does make it easy to set up a little physics example quickly, so you can see the effects of your code on some objects without doing much work to get the objects onstage. The classic example of this is making a ‘ball’ MovieClip, making it bounce, giving it gravity… all easy to do with Flash (of course you need to be able to understand ActionScript, because there’s no drag-and-drop physics however).

Ok that makes sense. I haven’t tried playing around with Flash at all, I was just wondering if there was a reason that there seems to be more physics simulations and physics in general in Flash games then games in other languages. That makes sense, it seems to me that once you know how to use Flash fairly well then setting up the graphical side of things is incredibly easy. I didn’t think there were any drag n drop physics in Flash but I was beginning to wonder haha.

-Gunder

I believe there was a physics engine for As2.

As for AS3, there is Fisix.

There are a couple out there for AS 2.0 and AS 3.0.

Fisix is a really well rounded engine. Worth looking at.