Last time I documented a rough setup for Bullet on iOS. I think this is much cleaner and would highly recommend you try it. It should take no more than an hour. If you have problems with this, please drop a comment and I’ll try to help you out.

Recipe for building bullet as an iOS ready static library

  1. Grab the archive. I used the *.tgz version (=> download page; Bullet physics engine homepage)
  2. Extract this somewhere you like; I put this under trunk/ext/bullet, thus renaming from bullet-x.xx to bullet
  3. Go to bullet/Extras/AllBulletDemosOSX; find a project named AllBulletDemos.xcodeproj
  4. Drag the project in your xcode workspace (requires XCode 4 or later). At the time of writing the OS X demos build correctly with XCode  4.0.2. Note that this is a MacOS project, not an iOS project – if you build and run you should see a window with lots of attractive demos. If you don’t see this window try to fix the project first(!).
  5. Create a new project (static library) in the same workspace. If you create this project inside the bullet folder, you could name it ios, then rename the project to bullet. You may let XCode create a unit tests target for you.
  6. Use the project navigator to find a group under AllBulletDemosOSX/src/src. Drag this group to the newly created bullet project.
  7. At project level in build settings, set the header search path to ../src and check ‘recursive’
  8. build.
  9. At this point you can remove AllBulletDemosOSX from your workspace if you wish.
  10. (strongly recommended) use the ‘hello world’ code from the bullet wiki to write a simple test, and make sure you get the test to build and run correctly. You probably need to add files that were not under AllBulletDemosOSX/src/src. This is likely to happen because there is no automation that reliably tells xcode to include new source files as they are added to the underlying src folder (sigh).
    In practice you will see a lot of linkage errors that can be easily fixed by adding the missing files from src/LinearMath/, src/BulletSoftBody, src/BulletCollision etc…
  11. (optional) fix the warnings that appear here and there and spoil the build.

Why do it this way?

There are several assumptions underlying this approach:

  • You won’t update very often and would like to check in the source in your own repository, or maybe you don’t use version control but want to keep tidy. I use the so called ‘ext’ folder for third party stuff.
  • You want a separate library; for this to work with iOS it has to be a static library.
  • You don’t want to ‘rearrange’ the archive content. You just want to refer the files you need. Using the archive ‘as is’ makes it easier to setup on several computers (you can check in your project along with the archive so anybody on your team can build it).
  • You want to have ‘unit tests’ handy so you can write tests while you’re learning how to use the library. I like to write tests to make sure I understand how the library works, and later the same tests can help me update to a newer version of the same library. Plus I find it much easier to write a few tests that output to the command line, rather than doing a big upfront integration with my software.
  • If you look at the sources it should become clear that you don’t need everything. I use AllBulletDemosOSX because it already contains references to most of the source files we need, so it saves time and effort (thanks to the bullet forums for the tip)

Is there a better way to do it?

I guess if you have the right make file or know how to create one and are willing to spend the time, maybe it would be better. Especially if it can automatically detect changes when you update to a more recent version of the library.

A few caveats

  • To rename a project, you can use the project navigator or the file inspector. You can rename a project the same way you rename a file in your xcode workspace and xcode will try to help you rename various entries. It’s easier than renaming the *.xcodeproj file yourself.
  • You may need help to setup unit tests. If you’ve never done it please consider doing it as it’s well worth it and there are good articles about this lying around.