Physics engine
From DmWiki
A physics engine is what gives a game an interactive world. A physics engine is usually made of collision detection and collision response stages.
Physics engines use different solver and step methods/models that depend on the purpose the physics engine is made for. For example, an FPS may need much more robust collision detection than a strategy/MMORPG game--a fast but inaccurate physics engine may be enough for a MMORPG but, if used in a FPS games, if bullets do not collide precisely, the player will get very frustrated.
Several free, good physics engines packages exist which can significantly reduce game development cost and time:
- Physics Abstraction Layer (http://pal.sourceforge.net/) - A free open source physics engine wrapper. Provides support for Ageia PhysX (a.k.a Novodex), Bullet, Dynamechs, JigLib, Meqon, Newton, ODE, OpenTissue, Tokamak, and TrueAxis.
- Games Physics Engine (http://www.game-physics-engine.info/) - This library is royalty-free for hobby use and an inexpensive alternative for commercial developers
- Newton Dymanics (http://www.newtondynamics.com/) - Popular physics engine, lot of powerful features, easy to use, free for personal and commercial use
- ODE (http://www.ode.org/) - Used in some commercial games, developed as open-source, good documentation, BSD license
- True Axis (http://www.trueaxis.com/) - Interesting physics engine, excellent solving collisions with very fast objects, free for non-commercial usage
- Tokamak Physics (http://www.tokamakphysics.com/) - Open source engine, free for commercial and non-commercial use
Choosing an engine
The Physics Abstraction Layer project provides a set of benchmarks to help you select the physics engine that performs best for your game and your platform. It also provides COLLADA physics support.
COLLADA is an open physics and graphics standard and allows you to exchange data between different physics engines and digital content creation tools.
See also
