Continuing my personal studies on simulating true gravitational acceleration in Actionscript, a couple days ago I arrived at one of the more conceptually challenging tasks I have tackled to date: the pendulum. I say conceptually challenging, because I tried to create a realistic pendulum in Flash a year or so ago and gave up after giving it a go. Now I realize that not only was my understanding of Actionscript limited then, but my realization of what true pendulum physics entails was also somewhat amiss.

As with any new task I set out to complete (especially those requiring a significant level of new knowledge on my part), I start with an array of Google searches — search terms like pendulum math, pendulum physics and actionscript pendulum tutorial to name a few. What intrigued me is that, while the results for such searches were incredibly numerous, very few of them actually tackled the topic of realistic pendulum movement. Instead, the majority of them (like this informative tutorial) create a facade to display a fairly believable pendulum motion by setting some random oscillation variables to the rotation of the movie clip. While this may suffice for the average SWF presentation, I wanted to find a much more realistic look that actually allows the pendulum object to react to forces acting upon it.
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