I really wanna know!! Why not use “Capsule”??
I wanna know how to pronounce.
I wanna know what is this word.
Plz give me the god’s answer!!
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It’s a cylinder with spherical top / bottom instead of flat planes, aka a sphylinder.
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It comes from a discussion between me (Andy) and Colm at MathEngine Oxford at some point in 1999. I was working on a human body library for our 3D physics SDK and wanted some round-ended cylinder primitives to model limb sections. We needed to call them something, but for some reason we forgot that the word ‘capsule’ existed and ended up using ‘sphyl’ as a combination of ‘SPHere’ and ‘cYLinder’ (which is how it’s pronounced - ss-fill’).
The Unreal Engine incorporated a descendant of MathEngine’s physics SDK, and although the code has changed a lot the terrible name is still there.
I can only apologise for this awful word, which I’m sure we would have put more thought into if we knew it was still going to be around over 20 years later.
Still, it could have been worse. It was nearly ‘sausage’.
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