What physics engine do you prefer and why?

[Julio Jerez]

I'm glad to see that Newton engine is also using a zlib license now.

Thank you it has been open source for almost five years now.
In a few weeks I will try Irrlich wrapper, or to make a maybe update the most current one.
Irrlicht and Game Studio were the two very first engine that used Newton back when I stared. and I like the engine a lot. so I will try to get a good integration. I case in respond to this post.
http://newtondynamics.com/forum/viewtop ... f=9&t=8843

[Cube_]

newton seems like a nice engine, I just picked bullet because it was the first one I stumbled accross that has an acceptable license and features I need, although it seems a bit daunting to hack it... I wonder if newton is more hackable, I need to implement some rather unusual physics engine features for my game and not having to write an entire physics engine would be really neat (you know, because I'm already wearing too many hats and wearing the hat of physics engine designer, programmer and tester would not help).

I'll probably play around with it a bit later.

[AReichl]

The Delta3D Engine uses PAL as a layer for several physics engines beneath.
Of course a layer has some drawbacks, but at least you are free to choose which
physics engine to use. And PAL even uses Irrlicht for its benchmarks and has a
sample how to integrate it with Irrlicht. I once thought about using it, but i had
trouble compiling Bullet or Newton (which then makes PAL useless, hehe), so i
gave up. Then came IrrBullet (with physics-animator-node, which is a special
Irrlicht thing) and so maybe that's the way to go.

[AReichl]

By the way - where can i download version 3.13?
I update from trunk every so often, but i cannot find a "ready" package for 3.13.

[CuteAlien]

I'm glad to see that Newton engine is also using a zlib license now.

Thank you it has been open source for almost five years now.

Must admit I haven't used any physics engine in the last 5 years, so been a while since I last took a look ;-)

[REDDemon]

By the way - where can i download version 3.13?
I update from trunk every so often, but i cannot find a "ready" package for 3.13.

https://github.com/MADEAPPS/newton-dynamics/releases

[AReichl]

There really seems to be an advantage if one can read - thanks!

[Julio Jerez]

The Delta3D Engine uses PAL as a layer for several physics engines beneath.
Of course a layer has some drawbacks, but at least you are free to choose which
physics engine to use. And PAL even uses Irrlicht for its benchmarks and has a
sample how to integrate it with Irrlicht. I once thought about using it, but i had
trouble compiling Bullet or Newton (which then makes PAL useless, hehe), so i
gave up. Then came IrrBullet (with physics-animator-node, which is a special
Irrlicht thing) and so maybe that's the way to go.

This was exactly the point of my post.
The PAL wrapper was not written for the purpose to unify all these engines with a common interface.
All the opposite, it was written to prop up what Mr Adrian Being and his collaborators estimated what good technology
while at the same time trying is shout down the penetration of others technology.

Mr Adrian is in the camp that if someone writes close source software somehow that person is committing a crime and person must be punished.
As such he when out of his way to create and interface that does not allowed for the newton engine to setup scene properly so that is work the best that it could.
He did that even when several people including me told him that he misrepresented the Newton engine.
http://adrianboeing.blogspot.com/2011/0 ... ngine.html

I would not be surprised if he too misrepresented other closed form engines.
Even after the Newton engine became Open source he refused to make the correction because by then he was too much invested with
Bullet and jibLib and he was no going to admit that he was dishonest.

Basically he did what some American News channel do when they want to discredit a politician or a celebrity,
they take the worse possible picture and the take phrases out of context, knowing well that their target audience will hear what they want to heard.
Mr Adrian and Mr Kenneth Bodin set the engine in such a way that it will generate the worse possible result so that he can confirmed thier bias.

This is not meant to discourage any one form continue using PAL, it is just to let you know that if you try to use Newton form PAL,
you will not get anywhere near close to what the engine can do.

[thanhle]

Hi Julio Jerez,
Maybe just ignore that test result from that Adrian dude.
It would be great to create a same demo showing how newton engine should be correctly being used for that example.

By the way, going through the Newton engine webpage, I don't see the detail feature listing.

Have you add softbody physic into the engine?

Will GPU be supported by the engine sometimes in the future?

Thanks,
thanh

[AReichl]

I have NOTHING against the Newton engine! Quite the opposite. I like the fact that it has a C interface, so you can compile it with Visual Studio and then link it with gcc/mingw (i don't get it to compile with mingw).
What i meant was that i would like to have a layer (like PAL) so i can switch the underlying engine.
Does someone have a comparison which engine runs on which platform; it's not THAT important but it would be nice to have the same platforms that Irrlicht supports.

[AReichl]

i forgot to link to this article:

http://markable.in/file/5a63614a-e16c-1 ... be164924a/

[REDDemon]

off topic: I remember once I tried to write a layer for audio (irrklang, caudio etc..) it was a pain because even tweaking to get same sound intensity was almost impossible, a physics engine is even more complex, guessing if it even make sense making a layer over a phys engine.

...I'll try build newton with mingw tomorrow.

[AReichl]

Same experience with a layer / wrapper for audio here.

You are right - that's why PAL "only" provides a common subset of functionality. And that's probably also the reason why the combination PAL / Newton does not show it's full potential in comparisons.

I mentioned IrrBullet above because it has some more features than Bullet alone, like "affectors" (in Irrlicht that's the animators, which is to my knowledge an unique feature in an engine).
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/forum/v ... hp?t=36861

Julio said he is willing to help and he knows Newton best, so together it should be possible to write the best wrapper for Irrlicht.

[REDDemon]

Yep it would be nice if Newton would be able to target animations along with irrlicht in both directions:

- automatic IK when collisions occur to animated bodies (and the body resume the animation in a physical realistic manner, thinking of a walking character that accidentally hit a stone with its foot, when collide the foot just stop animating, and animation also reduced partially for the leg, then it will fallback to animation, and in the process the baricenter of the body is moved so that the character will not look "unbalanced", so bascially if you get shoot on left foot you will move your weight on right foot).

[Julio Jerez]

I am doing the final touche on newton 3.14 the moment I have the stable release I see if I can revamp the wrapper that previews link