forest editor and the new bullet implementation

#1 The Forest Editor does not depend on any particular PhysicsPlugin, at least it shouldn't.

The Forest itself however does not have a collision representation implemented for the bullet plugin at this time.

#2 The bullet work is in progress... it should be ready for beta 1.

#3 Very good news about bullet ! :-)

I wait for the Mac version of course, but it's still an absolutly good news!

Nicolas Buquet
www.buquet-net.com/cv/

#4 I just saw the Bullet files, Bullet in T3D - this is really great!
This is like a christmas box :)

#5 well phys-x still hasn't seen fit to let me install their sdk so bullet may be the go by default....would love to be able to use havok. especially if they pursue the compute shader in dx11..mmmm physics acceleration for anyone with a current gen rig (win 7/vista compute is avaialble to dx10-11)

you guys may not be able to use it yet, but i've always felt nvidia having a stranglehold on hardware accelarated physics was just immature.

#6 yeah..i am a bit displeased with Nvidia, it has been nearly a week since i requested a new account to activate the physx sdk and they still haven't approved reactivating my account...so bullet is going to be the way to go, especially since nvidia is restricting its SDK so tightly now.

#7 Well i can say they gave me a new account in around 24 hours.

So if you haven't gotten one yet then maybe they've raised the bar and are not letting just anyone use it.

This would suck as it means we would have to put less priority on PhysX in the future if they're making it hard for Torque users to use it.

#8 you probably had something to write under company. some of us wouldn't have. i expect we're the ones that will be left waitting.

in nvidia's defence my situation is an OS reinstall on friday so i only tried registering on saturday. my time which would've been late friday america time. i wouldn't expect anything by this point yet.

#9 Well, the day Bullet and Havok bring GPU-accelerated physics for all is drawing closer and closer. Overly relying on PhysX, which will never be supported on AMD or Intel GPUs isn't wise unless you need to ship something ASAP.

#10 The only reason we used PhysX to begin with was that it was...

1. Fast.
2. Supported multithreading.

... Bullet caught up in the last few years and i think even its multithreading is pretty good now. I can't say for sure as their docs are possibly the worst i've seen.

But then NVidia starts showing APEX which provides a couple of stand alone tools and modules which implement some cool physics features with LOD.

So i'm hoping that NVidia does the right thing in the end and we will integrate APEX as soon as the beta hits our inbox, but we're still full steam ahead on Bullet.

Havok is next i hope.

#11 i think turbulence is pushing the wankfactor a bit hard. my opinion of destruction is only with full dynamic lighting.

and even then i'm opposed. artist defined destruction tends to look better and gives more control on what gives and what doesn't. players don't like seeing the same material be indestructible in the next room.

but that's where the games are heading, cloth i think is long overdue in pc games. it's been getting a good run on consoles of late and surely if i can buy a gts250 for 150 ausdollars (which has the same specs as a 9800gtx+) the standard pc space has no real excuse for not being more capable than a console.

apex seems to be built on a phys-x backbone, so it will still be nvidia only. and i fully understand that given the new microsoft position of forcing vendors to present the same front to developers this is about all they can do to differentiate themselves.

havok's performance in red faction geurilla is beyond excellent, all that carnage at a decent framerate just using cpu's, it justifies why so many companies still use havok. i know they are alot more strict licensing wise than phys x. i've honestly not seen bullet in action to know what it like. but if it can handle arrows it would certainly fit our needs.

#12 Just as clarification, having an nvida card is not required to use physx or apex. The benefit of having one is that you can do some of the physics simulation work on the gpu. So you may be able to have more physics based particles or cloth pieces but that's about it AFAIK.

Also I attended a talk given by the Red Faction team at GDC and 99% of what you see in that game is their own code. It is using havok for the rigid body simulation of broken pieces, but there is nothing extra-ordinary about that. All the breaking, collapsing, etc is work they did which does not even rely on havok.

#13 Just wondering if the Bullet implementation will support networking?

#14 @Steven - It may have some limited networking support for 1.1. There are a few issues that are keeping me from doing it correctly in the time we have remaining for the release.

#15 @Manoel Neto,

Quote:Well, the day Bullet and Havok bring GPU-accelerated physics for all is drawing closer and closer.

well, there is the cuda build for bullet, which is kinda just that...