Introduction
I’m working at the Recurse Center on a 3D rigid-body game physics engine in Elixir.
What’s that mean?
- 3D is pretty self-explanatory.
- Rigid-body means that the objects being simulated don’t deform due to collisions, so more like steel beams and less like wobbly jellyfish.
- Game physics is meant to describe simulations that are both decent-enough in fidelity for humans to predict behavior of objects and low-enough in fidelity to run in real-time (say, 30-60Hz).
- Engine means it should be reusable across other projects and have a clean API.
I want to see what features APIs some various engines support, and go from there. The API’s I’m looking at are:
- NVidia (formerly Ageia (formerly Novodex)) PhysX version 4.1
- ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) version 0.16? maybe?
- Bullet Physics version 3
- Box2D version 2.3