I’ve been doing some research into physics engines lately. I’ve always been fascinated by physics. It started back in high school. I remember well the moment that I learned that all this weird math stuff they kept forcing on me might actually have some point. Math might actually have some relevance to the real world. I want to thank my high school physics teacher for not getting too annoyed with me every time i interrupted her with dumb questions. hehe. Anyhow, there has been a trend of the last couple years with games outsourcing major components to 3rd parties. Physics is a good example. There are a couple of interesting new things coming up that will really make PC physics simulations a lot more interesting…
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Physics Coprocessors. Aegia PhysX (http:\/\/www.ageia.com\/)<\/a><\/p>\n This is a fun new concept, buying a coprocessor card, similar to your video card whose only purpose is to accelerate virtual physics. Free (mostly) physics APIs: (Not open source) Open source (and Free) physics APIs:<\/p>\n ODE – (http:\/\/www.ode.org\/)<\/a> although ODE seems to have some serious rough edges, it seems the most promising. It is THE target for open source physics engines. The API is a bit weird. Wrapping a C++ API with a C API seems counter intuitive to me. The samples don\u2019t build correctly out of the box (not for MSVS2003 anyhow). Although there seems to be several commercial games shipping using ODE. I can only guess that each user had to re-invent a lot of code then didn\u2019t bother to share their fixes. This leaves each user to do some re-invention.<\/p>\n
\nIt is very tempting to say they are the future of physics engines. Their licensing model may be a bit confusing and may turn some people off with its vagueness. The installer is quite complex and intrusive. It doesn\u2019t seem like it would easily bundle with a game download. Otherwise the API looks solid and the feature set looks complete. It is a little worrying that they may intentionally cripple the performance of the software (non hardware accelerated) engine so as to give more incentive to buy hardware?<\/p>\n
\n Newton<\/a><\/p>\n