The other weekend I was playing with APE. I must say, even though APE isn’t the most advanced physics engine for the Flash Platform out there, it is definitely easy to get up and running with. Maybe this is because of the limiting functionality of APE. The particles that APE offers are quite limited, Rectangle, Circle and Wheel. But still, there are some nice effects achievable with these three particles.

The main limitation I ran into when playing with APE was the fact that I couldn’t easily detect if a particle collided another particle. In the end, I ended up modifying the APE source by letting the AbtractItem (the base class for the AbstractParticle class) inherit from the Flash EventDispatcher class and modified the collision testing code in the CollisionDetector class to dispatch an event when a collision occurred.