user friendly Physics engine??

J.sean · Post by **J.sean** » Thu Sep 17, 2009 12:57 pm

hi.

I just finished irrlicht tutorial. I know I still have to study more.. but

I'm considering to study some physics engine so I googled some..

I got to know ode, bullet, physX, havok, and etc..

wow.. gotta admit this.... it's pretty difficult than it looks.. haha

I was wondered what's the most user friendly engine... and still powerful..

I tried bullet first.. and found it's not easy to approach...

then tried physX. of course it wasn't easy... but sdk contained a lot of

tutorials.. at least I was able to take a look although it wasn't easy at all..

so.... my question is.... if you recommend a physics engine to newbies,

what would you recommend? physX? havok??

please give me some tips... ^^

thanks.

FuzzYspo0N · Post by **FuzzYspo0N** » Thu Sep 17, 2009 1:23 pm

in my experience i have found bullet to be the easiest.

Simulations of physics requires certain foundational knowledge,

What it seems you are asking is to use something that has PREREQUISITE knowledge, without the prerequisite knowledge. You cant skip steps often in games at least.

This does not mean there is no easy way to do it, there are a GOOD number of wrappers for each of the physics implementations on this very forum.

The approach is pretty similar in most cases :

PhysicsWrapper -> addSceneNode( irrlicht node )

And bam, it works.

This is about as simple as you will get, and i dont see why that would be difficult

JP · Post by JP » Fri Sep 18, 2009 7:43 am

yeah if you're desperate to use a physics engine then at your stage a wrapper is probably best. IrrPhysx might be worth checking out and seeing how you get on with it, there are lots of other ones in the projects forum like IrrOde and IrrNewt, I can't comment on them myself though!

J.sean · Post by **J.sean** » Fri Sep 18, 2009 12:36 pm

hmmm.. I see..

anyways... I'm trying to study PhysX now.. I was able to finish settings to compile a new project with using physx engine. it took quite long time for me... haha

by the way... is PhysX dependent on Nvidia?? I'm afraid I might be dependent on Nvidia... which I don't want to.. so I was thinking about havok..

I can't study two engines at the same time.. I wanna choose the best one for me.

if PhysX is only good for Nvidia, I would rather choose Havok..

can you give me some advise for this problem please???

Tranen · Post by **Tranen** » Fri Sep 18, 2009 3:44 pm

I'm a noob but I don't think that bullet is hard to use.
It comes with a good user manual, documentation and lot of examples.

The only thing is that you need to compile it.

Here in the forum there are some example with bullet and irrlicht, one of this is similar to a wrapper.

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... hp?t=17910

You can check the code to learn how it works (it's what i'm currently doing)

Bullet is free and under active development.
It has also a good java porting with a good number of features (jbullet)

Hope it helps

FuzzYspo0N · Post by **FuzzYspo0N** » Fri Sep 18, 2009 3:53 pm

by the way... is PhysX dependent on Nvidia??

no, but there are "advanced" or "cooler" features, that would only be available on those specific nvidia cards. it does not affect the other normal usage (except when it uses that hardware acceleration for faster implementations) .

J.sean · Post by **J.sean** » Fri Sep 18, 2009 6:31 pm

umm.. ok... thanks for all..

and I'll take a look at bullet again...

guess it's worth a look again.. haha. thanks.

omar shaaban · Post by **omar shaaban** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 10:07 am

try irrphysx its the best!