best physics engine
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Userlibs/best physics engine
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| i am just getting back into blitz from a few months hiatus... what is the best physics engine? what is ODE? i am seeing 2 engines at least, so now i'm nice and confused. |
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| I like the original ODE the best. Most people prefer the JediveODE or the Tokamak stuff now though. I like ODE because its easy to use and stuff. And it can have some pretty nice physics apart from some bugs. |
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| ODE: ODE is an open source, high performance library for simulating rigid body dynamics. It is fully featured, stable, mature and platform independent with an easy to use C/C++ API. http://ode.org/ The C/C++ part means that you can't use ODE "drag'n'drop" style unless in your programs you're coding with those languages. Blitz3D needs a wrapper before we can use ODE - and those "engines" you have seen are just those, Blitz3D wrappers for ODE. Persoanlly I ilke (and have bought) JV-ODE (aka Jedive-ODE). |
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| The best physics engine is the one that suits your needs. I prefer ODE because of the quality documentation, the easy to understand function calls, and it feels right. I believe both engines are capable of a wide range of simulations, both are popular and enjoy continued support. Pick one and end your confusion. PS. Ask Halo which one is best because he can explain it better. 8) |
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| ODE is the only useful one. |
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| Tokamak is equally useful, perhaps in different ways. ODE has very nice carwheel joints which makes modelling a vehicle a trivial matter. I've used both with found both good and bad points with each. You should consider and try both Tokamak and ODE, and see which one has functions and abilities that suit your needs, as Wayne says. Neither is so much better as to render the other obsolete. |
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| what about wrappers? one ODE wrapper appears to be written by a student who might not update it in the future - is there one you'd recommend (I think i'll try ODE because i am dealing with vehicles) is it relatively easy to incorporate physics into an existing game? i have a car, i have playfield elements, i have enemy cars already moving - to convert to using ODE is painful or straightforward? |
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| I have integrated Tokamak into a bike racing game - basically, what happens is that no tokamak is used until a collision occurs - at that point the tokamak bodies are created, given velocities and from that point on Blitz positions and orients the Blitz entities according to the Tokamak entities, until the collision event is over and the Tokamak bodies are deleted and control of the Blitz entities is returned to normal. With a car game you would probably be using ODE all the time for the player's car, so you'd have to rip out your existing physics routines (or at least make them a swappable call with the ODE routines), add all the ODE initialisation stuff, including creating the ODE bodies and joints that match your car, then update ODE and your Blitz entities during your main program loop. I don't think it'd be too hard to do, but obviously the movement of your vehicles is going to change completely from that generated by your current physics routines, so it may mess up your AI and control balance. |
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| There is now a restricted demo version of JV-ODE available for download, this includes a simple car demo that can help guide you. Check the top post of the JV-ODE thread for the demo and have a play around with it. The JV-ODE wrapper is written and updated by both Jedive and myself, so there shouldn't be any problem with future updates/support. |
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| I'd just like to say, you guys are such great contributors to 'the cause'! (and effect in this case!) :) VIP3R and Jedive - thanks! IPete2. |
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