I'm making my first steps with the pymunk library and i'm reading the documentation. I found this extract:
People are sometimes confused by the difference between a force and an impulse. An impulse is a very large force applied over a very short period of time. Some examples are a ball hitting a wall or cannon firing. Chipmunk treats impulses as if they occur instantaneously by adding directly to the velocity of an object. Both impulses and forces are affected the mass of an object. Doubling the mass of the object will halve the effect.
Knowing dynamic physics, i can say that impulse is defined as the product between a force vector and an amount of time. So it would have come naturally to me that to apply an impulse to an object in pymunk one would have to specify a force and a time period as parameters.
Though the pymunk documentation not only fails at giving the precise definition of impulse but also says that it is treated the same way as a force and, in fact, i found that many people confuse them and use them in the same way.
So if the result is the same how can i distinguish them and make a thoughtful choice about which one i want to use in specific contexts?
