[ODE] ODE's speed

[nearaz]

> I'm curious, with ODE can we do something like that using fast step?
> I only tried faststep once briefly and will be investigating it 
> further soon.

The author of StepFast (D.Whittaker) did similar as a test for StepFast, 
where you drive lots of "cars" into a "wall" of boxes.

We did similar in LTGameJam2003 (http://jammy.sourceforge.net/2003), but 
apparently it didn't end up in any of the games.

We did walls of stacked boxes, cylinders etc., and it all went smoothly with 
object count up to a several hundred. Note that we used StepFast, TriCollider 
(unofficial at that time) and ODE's HashSpace for collision; physics was 
performing 150-200 (!) times per second, with 3-8 StepFast iterations. All 
went realtime (30-100FPS) on 1.3GHz CPUs...

I've inspected that when using StepFast and lots of objects, it's usually 
ODE's collision that takes non-minor amount of time. I guess that's related 
to the way HashSpace is computed... Haven't measured that much (or compared 
to QuadtreeSpace, which only made to ODE later) - it was sufficiently fast 
anyway :)


Aras Pranckevicius aka NeARAZ
http://www.gim.ktu.lt/nesnausk/nearaz/