[ODE] Introduction / Suggestions etc

[Malachy Duffin]

Hello all,

<INTRO>

Mal here from canDo Multimedia, an Irish 3D interactive development
company.  We are using a lot of Shockwave 3D at the moment ( along with
the online Havok engine ) for some web games, which you can see at...

http://www.candomultimedia.com/games/demos.htm

</INTRO>


Firstly, I don't know if many of you on the list know, but ODE will soon
be integrated as a physics option into the realtime 3D engine of the now
open sourced version of Blender ( www.blender.org ).

This is great for a number of reasons...

- It will raise the awareness of open source game related projects like
Blender and ODE.
- More developers will be keen to work on these projects
- Because Blender is cross platform, a lot of work will be carried out
to ensure that ODE is deployed on platforms that it wasn't available on
before
- ODE developers will be able to show what the engine can do online (
Blender has a web plugin )

Blender has a fairly high learning curve, but is a great prototyping
tool ( imagine designing a car, defining it's wheels / suspension / mass
etc and clicking a button to immediately let you drive it around a 3D
world for testing purposes / to let the artists play with parameters etc
).

I am looking forward to seeing a lot more content created this way!  It
makes it more accessible for artists to know how to design content for
physics based games ( using proxies, compound convex objects etc for
optimisations )


One quick suggestion, from the http://q12.org/ode/ode.html website there
doesn't seem to be any updates on news, or any easy way to see examples
of content created with ODE.

A quick revamp with a gallery of examples and links to downloadable
demos would be great, as a lot more people should be checking it out
over the coming months.


Thanks for taking the time to read the post, and I look forward to
reading future postings on this mailing list.

Mal