Extremely Large World

[pdusen]

Can Chipmunk be realistically used to handle physics for an extremely large (2D) world? If so, is there a particular way that this should be done?

Background:
For a mixture of different reasons, I am working on putting together a 2D MMO game (although whether there will ever be enough players for it to be considered truly "massive" is debatable). The game is going to be action-oriented, so if possible I'd like to do this with a capable physics engine. I have experience with Chipmunk from a number of smaller projects I've worked on, and have come to quite like it (and, more specifically, pymunk), so I obviously would prefer to use it for this project if that can realistically be done.

Note that I plan on dynamically distributing players by density across a number of different world servers; in other words, Chipmunk shouldn't have to deal with a massive number of entities. My question strictly has to do with how well Chipmunk can handle a massive 2D space.

I'm sorry if this has been asked before--I seem to remember reading something about it, but the search function has failed me.

[slembcke]

There shouldn't really be a problem with a large, sparse world. The spatial hashing algorithm that Chipmunk uses is mostly affected by the number of objects that you are putting in it. Chipmunk 6 will additionally offer AABB trees (and will be the default). It's a little more complicated with them, but they are also mostly affected by the number of objects and not the size of the world.