[ODE] LMotor

[Andrew Schroeder]

On Sun, 28 Nov 2004, Jan Kratochvil wrote:

>>  i added new joint to ode. It is called LMotor and it is analogous to
>> AMotor (in fact it is 75% copy paste of amotor). It does the same as
>> amotor but not for angular velocities but for linear velocities.  I
>> used and tested it for simulation of one body attached to world and it
>> did what i want.

On Sun, 28 Nov 2004, Nate W wrote:

>I was begging for this feature a couple years ago... tried to implement it
>myself, but didn't get anywhere.  Thanks for contributing this!  

Apparently at some point (Nov 28, 2004) someone (Nate) thought someone
else (Jan) had contributed a LMotor implementation to ODE.  Where is
it? I can't find it anywhere in CVS or anything more about it in the
ODE mailing list. (I can't even find the original messge from Jan,
oddly...)

I'm supprised more people aren't clamoring for this because my
understanding of it's function would be very handy.  Am I correct in
the following assumption:?  that the best reason to use a linear motor
instead of just "Mr Basic Physics"
  force = (new_velocity - old_velocity) * mass / time
is that like an aMotor, a lMotor would be able to "look ahead one
timestep" and calculate a force that would take into account the other
forces acting on the object. If so, this would simplify many things...

Andy

PS, My questions where: 1) Where is it? and, Wouldn't it be handy?