Re: [TuxKart-devel] Use ODE?

[Steve B. <sjb...@ai...>]

pmb wrote:
> I vote not to use ODE. We don't need all that complexity. I think we 
> should work on adding some kind of basic physics game functions to PLIB, 
> it would be sooo great.

I'm not 100% behind ODE - but complexity isn't the problem.

There isn't much complexity in the INTERFACE to ODE - it wouldn't add
much code.  There is vast complexity INSIDE ODE - but we don't care
much about that.

The car simulator I tried (and failed) to make work with ODE needed about
200 lines of code to interface to ODE.  The ODE demo program for a 3 wheeled
kart is about 350 lines in total - including graphics interface, user interface,
etc.

A home-made physics module would certainly be more than 350 lines of code. The
present (really crappy) physics for TuxKart is about that size already!

The problems with ODE in my case were all with the tuning of parameters in ODE
using 'real world' numbers from real cars.   I could have made a car that
behaved itself much more easily - but I *needed* to input real spring parameters,
real dimensions, real masses and hard-to-obtain things like rotational intertia
coefficients.   For a Kart simulator, we could take the parameters from the
ODE demo and tweak them a bit.

Like I said - you should try the ODE kart demo before passing judgement.

---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
HomeEmail: <sjb...@ai...>    WorkEmail: <sj...@li...>
HomePage : http://www.sjbaker.org
Projects : http://plib.sf.net    http://tuxaqfh.sf.net
            http://tuxkart.sf.net http://prettypoly.sf.net
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