Which physics library is easiest to integrate into irrlicht?

[insidious611]

Am working on a heavily physics-dependant Irrlicht-based game, and am wondering which physics library, of PhysX, ODE, Bullet, or others, is the easiest to integrate with Irrlicht?

Accuracy and speed are not heavy factors at this point, am still in prototyping stages.

My specific needs at the moment:
- Ability to pick up, drop, throw, arbitrary (though mostly cube based) objects with realistic reactions. (Earliest milestone)
- Ability to simulate the physics of flying and ground based vehicles with some degree of accuracy. (Later development)
- Ability to simulate binding one object to another in different ways, ie with rope, welding, etc. (Far later development)

[serengeor]

I find bullet physics engine pretty easy to integrate, requires minimal code. With others I can't really say, but I've seen people complain more about other engines.

You should probably just try yourself every engine that can do what you need.

[Mel]

Newton requires less setup, and uses the same matrix format as Irrlicht, but it is less accurate than others, like Bullet or Physx

[Nadro]

From my side I can say that Bullet is really easy to integrate

[randomMesh]

Here's a small Hello World program using Bullet. See for yourself how easy it is.

[insidious611]

Bullet or Newton then, leaning Bullet.

Thanks guys! That was very helpful.

[_Neo]

For me, Newton is easy to use, and it requires less time to learn.

[codetiger]

We are currently working on a Heavy Physics dependent game. And while we built our Game engine using Irrlicht, we opted to use a wrapper for many Physics engines so we can check the performance on different engines. We integrated Bullet 2.8, Physx 3.2.1, Tokamak and started working on Newton and ODE.

Shorting the engines:
Easy Setup:
100/100: Newton
97/100: Bullet
90/100: Physx
50/100: Tokamak

Performance:
100/100: Bullet (using multi-threading and some optimizations)
97/100: Physx (out of the box)

Features:
100/100: Physx
85/100: Bullet
80/100: Newton
50/100: Tokamak

Cross-platform:
100/100: Bullet
100/100: Tokamak
100/100: Newton
75/100: Physx

Overall Satisfaction:
100/100: Bullet
99/100: Physx
50/100: Tokamak

Note:

Tokamak: Forget him, if you use convexHull shape or irregular shapes. Otherwise, he's quite stable in stacking however inaccurate.
ODE: We we not really happy about the performance. Its not comparable with other engines.
Physx: The only engines with very good particle system.

Our choice: Bullet with cross-platform with high priority. And we'll definitely look to work with Physx in our next projects.


Edit:
Forgot to mention, all our tests were don't only under software version of Physx in both Mac and Windows.

[hendu]

Never forget:
http://semiaccurate.com/2010/07/07/nvid ... physx-cpu/

So if you use PhysX, only users with Nvidia GPUs will get good speed out of it.

edit: Nvidia users on Windows. I know they don't accel physx under linux, and don't think they do under mac.

[Granyte]

Ya and sometime PhysX does not work at all when an amd gpu is detected.

And bullet is devlopping a multi platform gpu acceleration based on OpenCL.