[ODE] Using ODE in Doom 3

[Gerhard W. Gruber]

On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 09:20:42 +1100, Geoff Carlton <gcarlton at iinet.net.au>
wrote:

>Doom3 had lame physics in their game (an occasional box that could fall 
>over).  I don't know what the underlying physics system is like, it is 
>possible that the engine can do far more impressive things than the 
>"vanilla" effort of Doom3.  It would be worth looking through the Doom3 

I already discussed this on Doom3world.com and the answer so far is that D3
has only what it needs.Also I think that D3 would surely show off their
physiscs if it is that good. :)

>code to see if it indeed can handle what you want before trying to 
>integrate another physics engine.  Sidenote:  Did they roll their own, 
>or use own of the existing commercial physics libs?

They use their own.

>Also, if you are doing a TC and heavily using physics, then I'd consider 
>going for HL2 instead.  This game shipped with Havok, which is very 
>expensive and very good, and is already networked (see HL2DM).  You're 
>not going to get anywhere near as good results with Doom3 and ODE, 
>period.  Of course, this is out of the scope of the question, and maybe 
>those Carmack shadows are more important than lots of gravgun toilets 
>flying around the map. :-)

Actually there are a variety of reasons why we don;t want to switch to HL2.

Steam is a major no-go for me.
D3 runs natively on linux.
Chances are good that D3 will be open sourced after some time, just as it's
predecessors.
Dynamic shadows is very important for our game (A "Thief Dark Project"
remake).
We were allready well in the work when HL2 finally was released.

That's more or less the most important ones, but there are quite a number of
others as well. :)

Of course D3 can do enough physics to serve our purpose, but if we can have a
better one, I would like to have it. :)

And I could imagine that other mods might also benefit from this, as they can
then use the ODE library as well.

-- 
Gerhard Gruber

Für jedes menschliche Problem gibt es immer eine einfache Lösung:
Klar, einleuchtend und falsch. (Henry Louis Mencken)