Re: [TuxKart-devel] Getting Started.

[Ingo R. <gr...@gm...>]

Steve Baker <sjb...@ai...> writes:

> We talked some about using ODE physics for this...that seems possible.
> This is a concrete decision we have to take - we can't start off on one route
> and change our minds.
>
> Does anyone have much ODE experience?   I've played with it (with mixed
> success).

I don't have experience with ODE and it seems pretty nice for boxes
that bounce around and such. However for Tuxkart I think all we need
is basically a 2D physics model, I don't want to see Karts crashing
realistically and go upside down and such, I want the Kart to stay
flat on the ground and allow nice drifts in the curves and I am not
sure how difficult it would be to get this drifting right with ODE.

Beside the lack of drift and some lack of precision in the collision
detection (easy to push other players through a wall) the current
physics seem already be quite useable.

> It's not clear whether we have to improve TuxKart's handling of '.ac', improve
> Blender's exporter, or write an entire new '.blend' loader for AC3D.  Comments
> please?

A .blend loader is unrealistic I think, unless things changed
recently.blend file format is still more or less a memory dump of
internal Blender structures and not meant to be read by other apps.
There his however a .xml based fileformat planed, but that isn't
present in the current version. A custom exporter is needed and
shouldn't be too difficult to create in the long run, for the time
being the standard .ac exporter seems to be enough.

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