Dont know if this should go to physics section but it's here.

Since the ODE is outdated and not updated anymore, and lacks of some features and some current features are not proper etc. people searches for some other physics engine. There is Aegia Physx, but it has some license fees for commerical use. Havok gonna be released soon, but also needs some license fees for commerical use, newton is really good and already works with GS.Aaand there is another open-source one, and licensed under zlib license for commerical projects. Has plenty of good features and imporeved everyday. The Bullet.

The latest features are Softbody physics, clothes, ropes etc. They also have ragdolls, and rigid bodies of course.

You should check their 4day-old demo that shows softbodies,ropes,clothes, rigid body attached to rope, again something attached to cloth, softbody collisions,ragdols, a BSP demo, something about concave and convex shapes +raytracers(its 1.30am here i didnt completely get them.), sliders, 3000 boxes falling test, 130+ ragdolls test etc. Check and see youself:
http://code.google.com/p/bullet/downloads/list

(the 1 mb one is the demo.)

Im really impressed, softbodies are new features in bullet so i belive that it will be improved more.

I dont know what conitec and GS developers and JCL thinks about current physics engine of acknex, and how deep ODE bruied in to acknex, but doing something like replacing ode with bullet would be great.But this has a very small possibility.

Since currently there is nothing about replacing the physics engine ,Would somebody(not me, im not that experienced) consider trying to plug this in to GS??

I fully agree! Please post this at the future forum.

Conitec really should replace the very lacking ODE with Bullet. Bullet is actively developed full time by Erwin Coumans and an active community.

Newton would be great too but it already can be used with Gamestudio and I think I have read somewhere that Conitec is sceptical about using closed source with no commercial support (Newton support actually is much better than ODE support though. With ODE there are no fixes for flaws which exist since years and the available source code doesn´t seem to help much to fix those either. :))

Physx is kind of stupid for several reasons not only because of the needed driver. A very overhyped engine (based on ODE) by a dislikable company (read John Carmack´s opinion about it).

Havok has great tools but isn´t free for commercial purposes.

The demos seems alright, but it's hard to judge a physics engine on that. I wasn't impressed by the performance during the 136 raggdoll characters falling down, nor the 3000 barrels coming down. It became a slideshow thing here....

A very overhyped engine (based on ODE) by a dislikable company (read John Carmack's opinion about it).

I think John Carmack just still feels bad about how Ageia didn't choose their next-gen Tech 5 engine, but instead went for Unreal based technology to showcase the PhysX physics stuff... I think I also vaguely remember Carmack saying the same thing about Havoc too when it was just released...

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=532&type=expert&pid=1



Carmack isn´t the only one with this opinion. Read a bit on the Bullet forums (where many physics programming experts hang around) for example. Or on the Ogre3D forums...

Performance isn´t the most important thing in physics engines at all and with 3000 entities you can get performance problems just with rendering (at least in Gamestudio :)). I don´t think other physics engines would be much faster. The Crysis barrel videos on youtube weren´t rendered in realtime for example.

just a small question... how were they rendered then?

if you have a system that runs the Crysis on that settings(i mean 5k barrels video), i believe bulet will also can handle it that fast(ok ok, maybe not as high performance as crysis but it will be faster.). And yes, if they are not rendered in realtime, how they are renedered?. The only thing here is all 5k barrels is not in sight at same time, but physics are not stopped for out-of-sight objects.

Each frame renders as long as it takes (with a fixed time step) and once it is done an image for the video gets written out. That´s how the Crysis barrel videos got done.

With render I also meant the physics calculations. You can easily do such barrel videos with almost every engine. Not very impressive at all. In the videos it looks like the barrel stacks aren´t even able to stand on their own. The are in a sleeping state and once they wake up everything instantly collapses.

I totally agree with you amy.

In fact, that Crysis video was sort of fake anyways, because it wasn't real-time. They could have done the same with 20K barrels....