Phyics engines

[FluffyFreak]

There are a number of very professional and open source physics engines that we could make use of for Pioneer.

Bullet:
Has been used with Orbiter to give planetary driving:
http://www.orbiter-forum.com/showthread.php?t=25176
http://www.orbiter-forum.com/showthread.php?t=22099
But was judged not good enough in another case:
http://johnwhigham.blogspot.co.uk/2015/ ... gines.html
and there's other examples:
http://bulletphysics.org/Bullet/phpBB3/ ... php?t=6173

This is just to get the discussion going but uses for it so far discussed have revolved around terrain interactions such as:

• detail ship collisions with terrain
• dynamic crashes, rolling, coming to rest etc
• dropping objects onto the terrain and having them interact appropriately

Other uses might be to improve/replace our ship-to-ship or ship-to-station collision systems.

[FluffyFreak]

<dv-> i guess we'll need bullet in double precision mode?
<dv-> does it take over gravity too?
<fluffyfreak> not necessarily, you could translate object positions back into local space and then float would be fine
<fluffyfreak> you can use Bullet for simulation or just collision detection/response I think
<dv-> local space?
<fluffyfreak> local as in relative to the thing you're expecting it to collide with
<fluffyfreak> so you wouldn't have the geopatch (for example) on the planet at the edeg of the solar system, you'd have it at 0,0,0 space facing "upwards", and you'd mtranslate the ships collision model (already in 0,0,0 space) into position relative too that

[GunChleoc]

VDrift uses bullet: http://vdrift.net/

Neverball uses PhysFS, which must have some form of gravity support: http://neverball.org/

Mind you I just translated them, so I have no idea how their code works ;)

[FluffyFreak]

<dv-> has started working on it and apparently has some success already. Very rapid progress.

Hoping that he pushes his Git branch so we can all see what's involved at some point.

[impaktor]

FYI: I believe dv- (IRC) is known as dvolk on git (did the orbit planning stuff) and cakjohnston here on the forum.