TrueAxis as a new physics engine

Lately, I have been working on new physics engine to replace a rather outdated ODE physics engine. ODE did a good job of starting the project, but its limitations have started to bog down the performance of the game.

What are those limitations? The main ones are inability to handle a lot of sleeping objects. That is, let's say we have 1000 boxes laying around the scene, while we control a tank moving around. A decent engine will be able to quickly parse out which objects need to be tested against, but in ODE collision detection is not optimized, so the product is poor performance. This is important, since I do expect all scenes to be like that: lots of sleeping objects. The second reason is instability: sometime ago I had to tweak things nicely to have more or less stable environment. But still I am running the simulation at 100 times per second, just to keep things from bouncing too much, yet it is still visible in demos. This is not only annoying but also eats up CPU.

Why TrueAxis? I had several requirements when choosing an engine. First of all, it has to be stable and perform well. Most engines other than ODE already do that (although not always for free). Second, it must support Linux. It is really hard to give up ability to develop under Linux. ;-) This cuts options down to two engines: Newton and TrueAxis. Now, this choice was easy since two engines seem to have gained a certain personality: Newton with correct physics (but slower?) and TrueAxis with handling of fast moving objects (but less correct?). My choice was a better performance for a price of less precise simulation and with an option of using super fast objects for missiles.

Any programmer out where will think: "Gee, moving to a different API, good luck on migrating your project." Luckily, I have foreseen this, and so used an abstract physics layer: OPAL. This way all I need to do is write a plugin for OPAL, without changing a single line of code in Ukrainian Rumble. Well, maybe some parameters would need to be changed around but that is handled in XML configuration files.

So, for the past 3 weeks I have been working on this plugin. It is not really hard but is time consuming. OPAL provides a lot of features, and I do use a lot of those features, so even though I implementing only stuff that I need, it will still take a bit. But I am getting close to a certain milestone: just a few things left to do.