Question on future 3d collisions

Question to Blitz Research:

Will there be a 3d collision module together with the "engine"? If so, please consider adding support for movable entities, so that you can have players standing platforms and such. "Hacking" this with pickEntity kind of solutions isn't very practical.

Now I rely on Nuclear Collisions which is very slow, especially the latest version, and "breaks" multiple OS support for my game(s).

nuclear sucks imo. I think Tokamak/ODE is a lot better.

I Like Tokamak but they have been kind of quiet for about a year now "Coming in 2004..." on webpage.

ODE looks like a perfect fit and Tommybear is already working on a module. (Tommy is the most prolific BlitzMAX'r yet by far!!!)

I am surpsised that people mix physics engines with collision engines.

Tokamak and ODE are physics engines, not collision engines. They just happen to have collision detection build in.

For example, Tokamak has a really bad friction model. Every object seem to "slide", even if you set friction and other parameters to the "max" to avoid sliding.

Why should you run an entire physics model, just to have some collisions in your arcade platform game?

You can't moveEntity or PositionEntity physics objects like you do with ordinary Blitz objects without problems. For example, in Tokamak you add force on objects to move them around. Not very handy if you want an arcade game with exact controls. And, if you use animated bodies instead of rigid bodies, you'll notice that this animated body pushes through other ridig bodies...with that approach you are not really using the collisions correctly anymore.

So, basicly, an collision engine *is* nessecary.

Who's saying it won't have collisions?

after 2,000 years of war and turmoil collisions and physics can now happily coexist...

"collisions" prefers to concern itself with the moment of impact of moving objects

"physics" allows the objects to move AND collide realistically.

back when collision processing was computationally expensive, you just got simple "spheres and boxes hit each other" stuff.

today, a "physics Engine" is almost mandatory for anything more than the most rudimentary of games.

don't get me wrong, I love retro (Galaga forever)

I am sure that we are going to be privy to 2d and 3d collisions as well as a full-blown dynamics engine.

just a matter of time.


but anyway, ODE ALSO has this


I am not sure is BRL is going to use an Open Source Collision library or roll their own.

If the collision engine can run without running the physics engine "steps" then indeed it would be a solution like you described.

I last read that mark was doing a lil physics action of his own...

yeah, I recall him mentioning how hard physics is to get right. I would be amazed if he wrote his own physics engine (although I am sure he is perfectly capable of it!) when an Open Source solution like ODE and a Freeware solution like Tokamak are available just for the effort it takes to integrate w/ bmax.

One thing that Mark has consistently done over the last 3-4 years (that I've been toying with Blitz) is to come up with solutions that make sense. some are under-appreciated by the community but all so far have been well done.

whether we get an ODE /TOKAMAK solution or a Blitz Research solution we can rest assured that it will be stable, fast and rock-solid.