Physics lib disscussion(&Poll)

[Luben]

Hi. I've used Newton for my last game project, but i know there are other libs out there.
So i thought i'd start a thread to figure out the pros and cons of the different libs, and see which one is most popular.
If you have any experience with a phys. lib, please share it!



Bullet:
+Free
+Open Source
+Used in PS3 apps.
+Still early stage of development
+Good documentation

Newton:
+Easy to get started with

PhysX:
-Additional dependencies

Havok:
+Uses GPGPU to do the same thing as the PhysX-card

[monkeycracks]

Newton for the simple fact that it's the only lib I've ever used and it's nice ^_^

[Dorth]

Luben, mate, you could have answered your own poll

[Luben]

Dorth, ?
If you mean that i could have voted myself, i didn't because i don't know which is best, since i've only used newton, and i'm quite unsure if it's the best , i just have more experience with it than the rest =P

[GameDude]

Bullet, its free and opensource, being used under the PS3 and plus it is pretty powerful.

[Jacob_x]

Bullet is very good, but i still dunno how to use it with Code::Blocks or Dev-Cpp. Any ideas?

[GameDude]

There's a tutorial or a demo somewhere here in the forums, I think it is in the project section or code snippets section, I don't remember.

[Luben]

We now have 14 votes, but except for GameDude, nobody has justified why they voted the way they did( "It's good" is not good enough to use when comparing )

[oldskoolPunk]

I chose Newton because it was really easy to get up-and-running, not to hard to learn, and have not yet found a reason to want to try a different one.

[GameDude]

Plus Bullet will probably get better since, it is still in early development stages in a way compared to other physics engines.

[theFALCO]

I use Newton because I couldn't find any better free engine (PhysX requires installing some additional stuff so I threw it away). And believe me, Havok is the best of them all if you don't look at the costs.

People say "PhysX is better because..." but ask yourself, which of those cool things run so cool without the PhysX hardware? Havok can turn your second graphics card into the same thing as PhysX HW, so when a game doesn't use PhysX (which means "when yu don't play CellFactor or Bet on Soldier") the HW lies unused, but with Havok, when you don't play a Havok game (there are many) you simply have two g-cards

I still don't know about TrueAxis. Has anybody used it? How does it stand?

In my opinion a physics engine should be primarily ranked by the number of simple rigid boxes it can handle before having the FPS dropped by 50%, then by it's features (convexes, fluids, demolision etc.)