Physx tutorials?

Are you certain you are looking at the official PhysX forums? I just checked and there are posts there as recent as today.

nVIDIA PhysX SDK Developer Forums

I would start by wrapping the actors and shapes in PhysX with your own simple game object types. Only deal with rigid bodies to start.

Also, you need to see the debug renderable from PhysX IMMEDIATELY, as well as in your game engine. Until you can see where your engine thinks things are, and where
PhysX thinks things are, you will have a really tough time debugging.

If you have specifics, I can probably help on the easy stuff, as I have had some success with PhysX rigid bodies, but I haven't dared get into the advanced features yet :)

You can use the PhysX visual debugger to check what's actually going on inside PhysX.

Well, that sounds good in theory, but in reality the visual debugger is broken and crashes if you have more than a few things going on. Also, you cannot easily compare your game objects to PhysX objects.

IMO, it's better to simply retrieve the vertex list and render it in-engine.

Quote:

Original post by programmer_tom Well, that sounds good in theory, but in reality the visual debugger is broken and crashes if you have more than a few things going on. Also, you cannot easily compare your game objects to PhysX objects. IMO, it's better to simply retrieve the vertex list and render it in-engine.

I have to disagree with this... i had an incredibly complex set of rigid bodies in my scene and it worked very well in identifying things that were going wrong.

the replay functionality of the debugger is amazing, and really helped out.

Check out the PhysX SDK, they have a lot of tutorials and even word documents on how to do some things.

it took me a week (part-time) to go from nothing to a cube bouncing in my renderer using the SDK examples. You actually dont even have to start with meshes if you dont want to. just use the cube primitive until you feel comfy enough with your implementation.

What was confusing about the tutorial code? you are correct in that it is different due to brevity. But the extra code in the actual running example should be understandable to a c programmer.

Thank you everyone for you quick replies.

Quote:

Original post by grhodes_at_work Are you certain you are looking at the official PhysX forums? I just checked and there are posts there as recent as today. nVIDIA PhysX SDK Developer Forums

Yes, those were the forums I was using. Nobody had replied in my thread for almost a week and my thread was still 2nd or 3rd on the list.

This forum seems to be a lot better.

Quote:

Original post by AverageJoeSSU I have to disagree with this... i had an incredibly complex set of rigid bodies in my scene and it worked very well in identifying things that were going wrong. the replay functionality of the debugger is amazing, and really helped out. Check out the PhysX SDK, they have a lot of tutorials and even word documents on how to do some things. it took me a week (part-time) to go from nothing to a cube bouncing in my renderer using the SDK examples. You actually dont even have to start with meshes if you dont want to. just use the cube primitive until you feel comfy enough with your implementation. What was confusing about the tutorial code? you are correct in that it is different due to brevity. But the extra code in the actual running example should be understandable to a c programmer.

What renderer were you using? I haven't been using a renderer at all.

By looking at the samples like "Lesson 101" I can understand what I see, it doesn't really seem very difficult. But when I look at the included Lesson101.h and see how much that is including, it gets kind of... intimidating. When I make my own program, am I supposed to do all of that myself?

What was your process to learn it so fast?

EDIT: Maybe if any of you are willing to share some of your first code you made when learning PhysX, I may be able to see how its properly done?