Categories
Game Development

Physics Engines

I expected to get a lot done today but I’ve been sick so progress is pretty slow. Anyway, I’ve been looking at physics engines. I found 3 right away: ODE, Tokamak, and Newton Dynamics. ODE was my first pick but the included projects wouldn’t compile. Faced with potentially several hours of getting it to work, […]

I expected to get a lot done today but I’ve been sick so progress is pretty slow. Anyway, I’ve been looking at physics engines. I found 3 right away: ODE, Tokamak, and Newton Dynamics.

ODE was my first pick but the included projects wouldn’t compile. Faced with potentially several hours of getting it to work, I checked around and it didn’t seem like anyone was using it. The project has not been updated for a year and a half. So as much as I like open source I moved on to Tokamak.

Tokamak looked very promising from the webpage. But on download they only offer DLLs.

Newton Dynamics looked competent and the projects compile. The documentation is about what you’d expect for a free library, if you had low expectations. The samples are interesting but much less impressive than what I’ve seen in commercial libraries. This isn’t necessarily a failing of the engine though. I like that in the documentation the author points out the same principle that I follow: an API is supposed to be a black box. He demonstrates his principle in the distribution – there is only one header file and you have your choice of DLLs or static libraries.

As usual it took a significant amount of trouble to get my behemoth of a solution compiling. Total time spent was only about an hour though, which is far better than certain other libraries.

When I feel better I’ll be back to try out some physics in action.

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