Why use Newton?

[vbCrLf]

Newton Game Dynamics is not very realistic and has some bugs.
There is a open source, free (even for commercial use) and very realistic one - Bullet. Its author is Erwin Coumans that worked for the Havok Physics Engine (Half-Life 2).

Try it...

[NetLizard]

Newton Game Dynamics is not very realistic and has some bugs.
There is a open source, free (even for commercial use) and very realistic one - Bullet. Its author is Erwin Coumans that worked for the Havok Physics Engine (Half-Life 2).

Try it...

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bullet

Bullet is a state-of-the-art 3D Collision Detection and Rigid Body Dynamics Library for games. ZLib license, free for commercial use, including Playstation 3. Supports COLLADA Physics. Visit forum at http://bulletphysics.com for support and feedback

[newborn]

When Sylvain started integrating Newton, there were not so many free libs available.

I think weve been waiting long enough for 6.5, can you just imagine how long would it push back the release date if they would have to change the physics engine? Integrating something like a P.E. is not such an easy task!

Now of course, if you want to use Bullet, you can simply add it to your project and leave aside the integrated TV3D engine.

[darqSHADOW]

Newton Game Dynamics is not very realistic and has some bugs.

Newton is the only true Newtonian physics engine available for free, it is simulation level physics and can reproduce many things that the other physics engines simply choke on, or kludge the result for.  Because a lot of our customers are using TV3D outside of the game arena, Newton was our only choice.  Rest assured that any bugs are being worked on constantly by both our team and Julio at Newton.

DS

[vbCrLf]

Integrating something like a P.E. is not such an easy task!

Now of course, if you want to use Bullet, you can simply add it to your project and leave aside the integrated TV3D engine.

Is it easy or not? If prefer using Bullet, but I have no idea where to start...

[BlindSide]

I've managed to get TV and PhysX working together (with a little help from the .Net wrapper).

It's simple to use another physics engine, really. Pass the DX mesh information to your physics lib, simulate, and then grab back the position/rotation of your objects. Then apply these to the corresponding TV meshes.

The rest, such as how to pass the information along, will be dependant on the library you use.

[Hypnotron]

Would be nice if there was a site where all of these physics engines were compared using the same scenes for each.

[Lyrical]

HI,
   TV3D and PhysX work really well i even have a nice demo of a vehicle running over a heightmap with rotating wheels and suspension.

The only problem is you loose a bit of speed as you need to translate the matrix information from PhysX to TV3D.

I wrote a couple of 30-40 page tutorials for PhysX and Direct3D a couple of years ago and they are still posted on the PhysX web site i believe.

I love using PhysX with TV3D however i am purchasing the Tv3D license at the end of the month just because it got A physics engine incorporated which will make it run far better than going through Jason Zelsnak's Wrapper (I have spoke to Jason a few times)

If anyone is interested i have created a couple of functrion for translating the PhysX matrix to TV3D for both 3x3 and 4x4 its not hard but it may save a bit of time.

Can't wait to get my hand on the full license of TV3D and the TV3D v6.5 beta

[Hypnotron]

Interesting.  I really doubt copying the matrix members from one struct to another would significantly slow down the application.  Are you sure it wasnt slow for other reasons?  Is performance the only issue you had using PhysX?  I.E the simulation was stable and accurate?

[Hypnotron]

ive been googling a bit and from what ive been able to gather...

 PhysX seems to be very good but alot of people are turned off by the fact that you have to install ~20 meg hardware driver on your end user's machine.
http://www.ageia.com/drivers/drivers.html
 Blech.   But other than that it sounds to be fast (faster than the rest with the exception of maybe Havok), stable and polished.  It supports some things the other free/affordable libraries dont such as cloth simulation.

Bullet which is a relatively new open src physics library is still a work in progress and needs to be optimized.  I think it could be worth taking a look at if you were one year+ away from wanting to release something.

Newton?  i'm not entirely sure why it's not mentioned more.  Its been around a long time.  People generally agree its better than ODE and its still has a solid community of users.

Tokamak seems to be dead in the water.

Havok could be the best physics library out there but it costs a nice chunk of change to use it.

[BlindSide]

Netwon is the best free lib available for simulation. PhysX is the best free lib for GAMING simulations, as far as I am concerned. Both for its speed (it IS fast), ease of use, and feature set (includes cloth and fluids, IK characters, etc).

The slowdown in PhysX and TV might be COM overhead - however if you are using the static lib/.net DLL's in 6.5, there is virtually no overhead, and performance should remain good.

[Lyrical]

I do seem to get good performance from PhysX however i know if you start giving the engine something like 1000-2000 boxes to simulate is slows down.

I havn't tested to much in performace i just presumed that loosing cpu cycles everytime you need to translate the matrix from PhysX to TV3D would be a waste.

My vehicle demo runs pretty well. It contains a modified Vehicle class from Jason Zelsnak and his wrapper (the wrapper is excellent by the way).
the demo also includes the following.

Heightmap used for both TV3D landscape and a PhysX Mesh as fairly accurate.
Suspension
Steering
front/rear/4 wheel drive settings (Jasons Zelsnak default)
Rotation of the wheels that actually look like they are rolling on the surface.
Skybox (TV3D demo)
2-3 boxes to push about
A ramp made from a static box and a Plane dropped on top
A further white box to act as a trigger that resets the vehicle in a set location
Boxmesh for the vehicle and PhysX wheel shapes

If anyone is interested in the demo souce you can find it here

http://www.instate.co.uk/tutorials/truevision/FreeDrive.zip

You may also need the Wrapper and PhysX of course

http://www.zelsnack.com/jason/JttZ/Novodex_NET_Wrapper/

Ageia PhysX - Will require register to download

http://devsupport.ageia.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=1949

Take a look if you're really interested in PhysX if not wait for TV3D v6.5

Either way Enjoy.

[vincimus]

 Havok Physics has now been relinquished to the public for free. Go to havok.com and get it.

[newborn]

Havok Physics has now been relinquished to the public for free. Go to havok.com and get it.

free for non-commercial

[nullsquared]

Newton Game Dynamics is not very realistic and has some bugs.

You're being sarcastic, right?  Newton is the the most accurate physics engine out there.  Any inaccuracies are due to user error in providing realistic information (such as units being meters, correct mass for a certain volume of certain physical properties, etc.).

Do ~1000 boxes really slow down PhysX?  Newton Archimedia/v2.0 (beta13 at this moment) can handle 1000 concave (not convex, I said concave) hulls at ~20FPS when using 4 threads.  And it can use up to 8 threads

If anything, I suggest TV3D migrates to Newton Archimedia.

[AriusEso]

Yes, I am waiting for Newton2 integration. I know the team has it . As for the realism, this is as Agi says. It very much depends on accurate data being passed to the engine. I currently just tweak things till they look right. But if you take a look at some of the oceanic things Waterman has, and is, doing you will be amazed at how accurate it can be.

[Hypnotron]

free for non-commercial

Actually it's free for PC commercial too.  The only think you have to do however is apply for a free license where you have to (presumably) provide them with a copy of your game so they can verify you complied with the logo requirements.  That means they probably require you to include a splash screen at startup saying "powered by Havok" or some such...

Apparently Intel worked out this arrangement with the Havok folks because they don't want developers simply all rushing to use nVidia's recently acquired PhysX.  So again, Havok physics is free to use for commercial PC games as well.

As for Netwon's accuracy, I think for the vast majority of games newton's superior accuracy is not only not needed but its not even noticeable.  So if this accuracy comes at a significant cpu performance price then hardcore no compromise accuracy is a bad thing.

[nullsquared]

As for Netwon's accuracy, I think for the vast majority of games newton's superior accuracy is not only not needed but its not even noticeable.  So if this accuracy comes at a significant cpu performance price then hardcore no compromise accuracy is a bad thing.

On my 2.0GHz Athlon64 X2, with two threads Newton ran at 10 FPS with 1000 stacked concave hulls.  It ran at 30+ FPS when cylinders/boxes/spheres were used instead.