ODE with SDL tutorials?

I've heard that the Inertia2DEngine is good for dedicated 2D physics.

Actually, me and a friend are writing some ODE articles. The only ones started are a introduction to ODE and a using ODE with Plane2D (a 2D joint constraint for ODE).

It would be nice to have some "common users" as reviewers, after it has passed some other reviews. If any of you are interested, drop me a PM.

I'd be willing to go through those articles for you, Seriema.

I, too. I'd like to use this stuff with SDL/OpenGL, as implementing the physics of even a GTA-style turning car is pretty difficult for my sci-fi weaned brain. [wink]

Rob: Thanks for the link to InertiaEngine.

thank you

hopefully this thread will re-spark our fire ;)

Hey Seriema, I actually thought about using Plane2D myself, but as usual I'm not able to find any good documentation or tutorials for it. So I would be really interested in reading your articles about it!

Yeah the problem with Plane2D is the extreme lack of documentation and/or examples. There's ONE example by the original author, but he uses stuff he shouldn't be using (like the internal ODE classes, prefixed with dx) and does too much for me to get my head around. But the biggest problem that it won't run at all, giving me a weird error message about not being able to set up my screen or something. Either way, I finally got it working. Compiling ODE wasn't fun either, because the VS.NET solution were missing several files.

Well I'll try to get this through the door as soon as possible ;)

It'll be interesting to see where this goes ('specially if you include a reasonable way to perform high-speed object collisions). ;)

Well the idea is a "gentle introduction to ODE" article as base. Then several smaller articles covering different areas, so it won't be one big-ass tutorial and one can choose what's interesting :)

Gorax, I'm not sure what you mean by high-speed object collisions since ODE does have it's own collision system. There are some parameters and different "space types" you can create but.. Did you mean rolling your own collision code? Because ODE does support that and we plan to cover it in a later article.

Quote:

Original post by Seriema Well the idea is a "gentle introduction to ODE" article as base.

Nice! That sounds like exactly the thing I was looking for! can't wait to read it =)

I mean having something the size of a tennis ball being projected at a human-head sized object at such a high speed (100s of km/h) that ODE's collision detection causes the ball to either completely misses the head and pass straight through, or only just clip it and doesn't do much (if anything), instead of bouncing off the head and sending the head back (as it would in real life). The only way I thought about doing it was casting a few rays from every object and checking if they will collide with other objects. Unfortunately, creating too many rays would chew up too much processing time, but too few, and it wont work right.

I took the time a while ago to set up a whole load of different object properties and the collision detections for each of them (including liquids, but I haven't implemented density checking yet, so everything still sinks), and every idea I've come up about the high-speed collisions, would require either too much processing time, or wouldn't be accurate enough (maybe I haven't thought about it enough...).

hmmm

We were planning on a article where we discuss how to send objects flying from begin "shot", if that's what you're after?

First of we'll have to finish this article. And when it's done we'll discuss the next step =)