[Bf-committers] Gameengine - ODE and Python

[Alexander Ewering]

Hi Kester,

intrr here. It's great to see someone finally gets really involved
with the game engine.

I never bothered to look into Blender's game engine features too
much, until this weekend. And I must say, I am quite impressed
with it. Managed to do a little world with quite complex stuff
I've never seen so far in commercial games, so I guess this
gameengine is quite promising, and I'm willing to help to bring
it back and improve it, AS FAR AS I CAN, of course :)

I don't have _any_ C++ skills, though I do have some knowledge
(see audio-sequence-stuff) in C.

> weekend.  This is what I accomplished:

I suppose you are working on a local 2.28 tree?

> Code to trigger the sensors that depend on collision detection: ray, touch, 
> collision and near.

Great. So they fully work again?

> Sound.  Sound plays on Linux.  intrr has disabled the game engine sound - my 
> sound driver will allow /dev/dsp to be opened more than once.

Yes, I had to disable it for that reason. Another possibility
would be to have the gameengine redirect its output to the SDL
mixing buffer.

> TODO: 
> 1. radar: ode has no cone primitive.  Ray: only works along the +z axis.  I'm 
> going to look at the ODE transfrom class and see if that helps.  If that 
> works, radar could be implemented by firing rays in a randomly within the 
> cone.

I don't know what the Radar sensor does.

> 2. Use ODE trimesh support.  Only box and sphere bounding boxes are used.

Box? That hasn't been in 2.25 as far as I know. I only know
the usual "sphere" bounding box. So you added that?

> 3. Cleanup memory management. Not doing that yet! :(

Hmhmhmmmmmmm... :)

> 4. Write an SDL audio out.

Exactly - This is something I could look into I think.

> 5. Wrap ODE in Python for Blender - cloth simulations etc.

Too advanced for me :)

> The physics is a bit different to 2.24 - less game physics, more real physics. 
> eg a sphere above an inclined plane will drop and roll down instead of 
> bouncing down.

What exactly do you mean? That depends on the material types.
A real sphere _will_ bounce (and not roll) down an inclined plane
if the materials are like that. So are you saying that ODE
doesn't support elastic materials, or that you didn't implement
it yet?

Regards

| alexander ewering           instinctive new media
| ae@instinctive.de       http://www.instinctive.de 
|
| fon: +49-2393-220558         fax: +49-2393-220559