[ODE] networking

[Nate W]

On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, pia dalusong wrote:

> i have a problem networking my ode robot simulator
> program.  the program shows robots from different
> computers but they do not collide with each other. 

Are geom objects being created and sized and positioned correctly for all
of the bodies?  Are all of the geom objects in the same space?  

When I was having trouble with collisions, I found it helpful to dump the
names of each object at the very start of my collision callback.  If
you're not using the user-data pointer, set it to a char pointer with the
object's name.  If you are using the user-data pointer to point to an
object of a class that you've defined, add a 'name' member to that
class.  This makes all kinds of debugging easier, IME.

Also, out of curiousity, how are you doing the networking?  Does all of
the simulation take place on a server, or do the clients do some of the
simulation math?  I've been pondering a networked application using ODE
for a while and I'm looking for ideas.  I also thought it might be cool to
create a simple networking 'contrib' for ODE, since interactive networked
simulations could be used to do all kinds of fun stuff.  It's an
interesting distributed-computing problem, though. :-)

-- 

Nate Waddoups
Redmond WA USA
http://www.natew.com