I finally got newton physics to work for me, and have an interface even an idiot like me can understand. So now, I can tick off 3d sound sources, AND simple rigid body physics on the list of neat stuff in the fnord engine
BTW thanks so much to mercior for his tutorial!! basically all I had to do was figure out how I wanted the interface to work, re-organize his code a bit, make it into an object, and viola, there was my physics driver!
as always, its all in the cvs at http://fmorg.sf.net