Hello, I''ve tried looking around for a decent physics library for my game to handle simple collisions and i''ve turned up with basically nothing. I looked into the V-Collide library, but there seems to be no download page or anything, and it seems to have been on hold since 1998. Are there any other free, simple physics libraries out there that anyone has used? What did you think of it? Was it easy to integrate in your game? Any help is appreciated. -timiscool999 "I like waffles. Especially with syrup." -me
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-timiscool999
"I like waffles. Especially with syrup." -me

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Since you''re probably looking for something free, why don''t you try this:

http://q12.org/ode/ode.html

I have no experience with it.

The commercial things are havok (www.havok.com) and Karma (www.mathengine.com), both, shall we say, "pricey".

Graham Rhodes
Senior Scientist
Applied Research Associates, Inc.

There''s also Dynamo which is C++ rather than ode''s C (and I suspect it preferrable to most for that reason alone).

Depending on your time and knowledge you could roll your own (see Baraff''s physics papers as a start point).

In actual fact physics engines are pretty easy (if you undersatnd the maths...) - up to the point of collision detection and response. For both ode and dynamo you need to plug in collision detection (I think).

I''ve not used either of these, but they look fairly complete and accessible. Both have excellent documentation, and you get source code and examples (open source).

Warning: real physics is not always applicable to computer games, it''s difficult to use along side scripting, and it tends to be an all or nothing affair - either you have a complete physics system doing everything, or you have a scripting system that fakes physics.

As an addon to that - you can''t edit physics to do what you want (that''s the point). If you make a model car and it''s not arcady enough under your physics engine, well tough - it''s extreme difficult to gameplay balance realtime rigidbody simulations :-)

I''ve looked too and found nothing that was free and did what I wanted: collision detection for a *set* of *moving* AABB, bounding spheres, and trimeshes that provides the contact points and collision planes. So I wrote my own, which was a pain, but it allowed me to make optimizations specific to my engine that a generic algorithm could not.