comparing physics engines versus Irrlicht for collisions

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Wolf Dreamer
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comparing physics engines versus Irrlicht for collisions

Post by Wolf Dreamer »

Does anyone have any numbers showing exactly how much faster various physics engines are compared to Irrlicht and each other?

Has anyone compiled any of these other engines into a DLL that allows us to easily replace the Irrlicht collision checking with them instead? Same names for functions, and look there first, or similar name us just having to find each place a command was called and adding a letter to the function name to check for Newton/etc. instead?
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cartoonit
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Post by cartoonit »

10 - 6??? :o

You have to integrate the physics in to Irrlicht, I don't think it would be beneficial to compile the two together, creating a wrapper yes. But compiling both together for a dll probably isn't allowed. In fact I don't think you can have access to Newton and recompile so no its not been done. There is a wrapper though on the projects page Irrlicht + Newton == Irrlicht++ or something like this...

Keeping them seperate the graphics and the physics engine would allow portability as well, remember you might not always Irrlicht and a physics engine together... :roll:
katoun
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Post by katoun »

One idea would be to change Irrlicht's colision manager with ODE, so changing ODE so it would be integrated inside Irrlicht. We know ODE is platform independent like Irrlicht.
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SARIN
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Post by SARIN »

collisions between the 2 are not the same, and if they were, it wouldnt be physics. even if they were compiled together, they both wouldnt make the same calls to the same classes, so it would be like 2 dlls in one, and the only trouble it saves u is not linking the second. so whats the point?
btw, its newton++ http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... php?t=5648
cmoibenlepro
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Post by cmoibenlepro »

I don't like the idea to have a 3rd party physics engine integrated into Irrlicht...
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Post by katoun »

Well that 3rd party physics has some experience with that Niko and I believe most users of Irrlicht don't have that mutch.
So ODE I think it is the best code to START FROM and make Irrlicht's collision manager beter. I didn't ment to just put it there inside Irr.
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Post by etcaptor »

Irrlicht collision animator can be improved like basic physics collision animator. It's not a big problem to implement some Newton functions from physics books. But if you need any advanced physic engine ODE or Newton are the choice.
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Electron
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Post by Electron »

True Axis and Novodex are getting some attention lately too. I haven't tried either one, though one thing that impressed me about the True Axis demos was its ability to handle small, fast objects
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Post by katoun »

:evil:
Yes and what about True Axis and Novodex's licence?
Aren't both free FOR NONCOMERCIAL.
I now Novodex is realy nice hase nice features, works fast with a lot of objecs and it easy to work with it but I heard on theyr forums is preaty expensive :!:
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Post by katoun »

:evil:
Yes and what about True Axis and Novodex's licence?
Aren't both free FOR NONCOMERCIAL.
I now Novodex is realy nice hase nice features, works fast with a lot of objecs and it easy to work with it but I heard on theyr forums is preaty expensive :!:
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buhatkj
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ODE...

Post by buhatkj »

True, ODE is the only physics package I am aware of that is truly Open Source. Hence it would be the only one we would have a shot at integrating with Irrlicht (whether we would even WANT to do that is another issue entirely...)
However, ODE does not (c'mon, admit it!) have the greatest interface in the world. Compared to ODE using Newton is a breeze. That isn't to say that we might not easily wrap ODE in such a way that it was just as easy to use as Irrlicht, I'm just saying that as far as I know it has not been done YET.

For the basic irrlicht user the best situation would be a generic physics animator which uses (in it's most simple form) the bounding box of the node (for animatedmesh) or the actual triangles (in the case of an octtree) to determine the proper response to collision. This would require significant additions to irrlicht's materials system to support physics properties as part of materials settings and in the interest or working with different licencing issues we would want to be able to use a common interface to the various underlying physics packages that provided the actual physics math and so forth. Something like this was attempted for the ROCKET physics scripting language thinger that uses novodex. (they intend to add support for other physics engines at some point...)

In my work on FNORD, I am trying to write a layer above irrlicht's material/textures to contain the physics properties of that fgiven material as well, and at some point I will get around to actually making newton work lol ;-)
My irrlicht-based projects have gone underground for now, but if you want, check out my webcomic instead! http://brokenboomerang.net
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