[ODE] ODE in its own thread

[Aras Pranckevicius]

> Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone has tried implementing physics
using
> multi-threading and if so, how did you implement it in order to obtain a
> performance boost from it.  Is this worth the trouble or should I just
> stick to the simple way of doing things? :)

FreeFall buggy demo from ODE's community page does just that (the physics
sim is in separate thread) -
http://freefall.freehosting.net/downloads/buggydemo.html (and it's using
D3D, and has full source code).

I don't know why it does that - probably because Stepfast didn't exist at
that time, and physics could take some long time (eg. for a stack of
spheres). I guess multi-threading could bring some benefit, as rendering
involves some waiting for the video card at times (especially if your
rendering code is suboptimal :)).



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