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Why from ODE to Novodex?

Discussion in 'Editor & General Support' started by taumel, Jul 4, 2005.

  1. taumel

    taumel

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    Hi,

    i wanted to ask what were the main reasons for switching from ODE to Novodex? As it's not free and you do have to pay licence fees there must be some big advantage.

    So is it the pure speed, future hw-support from ageia, further develompent, thread based engine,...


    Greetings,

    taumel
     
    taumel, Jul 4, 2005
    #1

  2. Joachim_Ante

    Joachim_Ante

    Unity Technologies

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    * Stability.
    * Speed
    * Having a physics engine that is better than havok
    * I think novodex is going to become an industry standard for physics engines pretty soon.
     
    Joachim_Ante, Jul 4, 2005
    #2

  3. taumel

    taumel

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    Thanks for the answer!

    In which situations did you experience ODE unstable?

    By the way i once downloaded 2.1 of the novodex-sdk and played around with it a bit but nothing more...

    Does novodex support soft-bodies?


    Greetings,

    taumel
     
    taumel, Jul 4, 2005
    #3

  4. Joachim_Ante

    Joachim_Ante

    Unity Technologies

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    The main instabilities in ODE come from its collision detection.
    Speed difference comes from a lot of places. Collision detection is one of them. The solver is not that fast either.

    I mean, ODE has served us well, if you know how to work around some bugs when writing game code.
    But for unity we needed something that:
    a) Kicks directors and virtools butt
    b) Works stable in all situations.

    Novodex doesn't support soft bodies yet, but they are working on it.
    Novodex is moving forward very fast and unity will take advantage of that.
     
    Joachim_Ante, Jul 4, 2005
    #4

  5. taumel

    taumel

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    >>>I mean, ODE has served us well, if you know how to work around some bugs when writing game code.
    But for unity we needed something that:

    a) Kicks directors and virtools butt
    b) Works stable in all situations.<<<

    Well at least kickin Directors butt isn't hard to achieve! It's so buggy and slow. Virtools Havok Plugin was much more stable and better than the director version (higher revision). But it was also not version 2 based engine so i guess you already achieved this.


    <<<Novodex doesn't support soft bodies yet, but they are working on it.
    Novodex is moving forward very fast and unity will take advantage of that.>>>

    Nice to hear as it doesn't make sense faking soft bodies out of rigid ones by yourself...


    Greetings,

    taumel
     
    taumel, Jul 4, 2005
    #5