Chipmunk Pro is a cross-platform set of additions to Chipmunk that makes your game development easier with a growing set of tools designed to get you past the most tedious and time consuming parts of game development. Hundreds of shipping games have chosen Chipmunk because of the high quality, speed, and accuracy of its 2D physics simulations.
Cross Platform and Optimized
Mobile development offers unique performance challenges, and Chipmunk Pro is specifically optimized for speed by offering a multi-threaded and vectorized solver. The Pro edition offers an alternative cpSpace type, cpHastySpace, which will automatically use the ARM NEON vector coprocessor available to most Android and iOS mobile devices. Even if you don't need the extra performance, it will help save your player's batteries. cpHastySpace also allows you to enable extra threads for the solver to use as well.
Chipmunk is widely used for 2D physics rich games on Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, and game consoles. If you have a C or C++ compiler, you can use Chipmunk Pro. Some functionality is platform specific, such as the Objective-Chipmunk wrapper (iOS, Mac OS X, or an alternative Obj-C runtime), the NEON optimizations (requires an ARM CPU with a NEON coprocessor), or multi-threading (currently requires pthread support).
Autogeometry
Level design and asset creation is a time consuming portion of game development, and Chipmunk Pro can significantly aid in creating your physics shapes. Chipmunk Pro's automatic geometry generation can create fitted collision geometry from images. Gone are the days of typing coordinates to generate collision shapes. The Autogeometry generation can create the physics shape for the terrain of your game from an image in milliseconds, allowing rapid iteration with just your graphics tools. This geometry can even be generated on the fly at runtime providing for spectacular techniques, such as deformable objects and terrain (Demo video on youtube). See Scott's walkthrough of collision shape generation from images.
Accelerate iOS Development
For iOS development, Chipmunk Pro includes "Objective-Chipmunk", an Objective-C wrapper around all Chipmunk functionality. This provides greatly simplified memory management (especially when combined with automatic reference counting), an object oriented syntax, convenience classes for multi-touch input, and more. This speeds your development and reduces debugging. Your time is valuable!
Indie Friendly
Chipmunk offers AAA-quality physics features and performance, but it doesn't come with a AAA price. With the popular Chipmunk Indie license, you can have access to the C and Objective-C APIs (including ARC, object management, and utility classes!) at a very Indie-friendly price. Whichever license you choose, you can use Chipmunk Pro in as many games as you want!
Free Trial and Example Code
A free trial version of Chipmunk Pro for iPhone is available on the downloads page. It's feature complete, but cannot be used in a released game. You can also check out all of the example code on the documentation page. Once you've purchased Chipmunk Pro, we'll email you a username/password to download the full version.
When Do You Need to Buy?
If you are building an iOS application, the provided trial library will create a dialog informing the user it's a trial version, but is otherwise unrestricted. To remove this window and be allowed to distribute the game, you'll need to purchase Chipmunk Pro. After buying it, you get full access to source code and can use it on as many projects as you want.
