[ODE] Big Message, small questions.

[Cy]

Wow, wow and Double WOW!

Last year in September, i decided to stop my work as the main scripter on a
big german Neverwinter Nights Server. But soon i realized that my family
does not need me the whole evening ;) So i begun to collect. Ideas, Sources,
People... And now i have a lot to do. We are still on the start of our
project and only some simple prototype programs are written. The current
step is to look for material, sort out the bads, collect and ... decide.
(Target is somewhere in 4 years and the goal is to have fun during the work
on it).

There are many impressive solutions for the different parts of our main
program. And some are hidden and unknown to most of the developers. They
speak about "Crystal Space" and "OGRE", but these are too big in my eyes. I
did get the CVS of OGRE to compile, but Planeshift with CrystalSpace was a
pain. And my internet walk continued. Found nice small articles on gamedev
about network and directx programming. NEHE is an unbelievable site for any
opengl developer with so much small, but really good projects. flipcode's
forum is imo a meeting point for people of the gaming industry, i ever
dreamed of to meet them.

And sometimes i found the things, that make me smiling. For example, when i
found the perlin face animation at
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/facedemo/face2.html. So easy, how he took only
some vertexes, and a moving vector.. and such impressive results. I will
contact him for the permission to use his idea. But now to the reason
subscribing ODE. (Sorry, sometimes i forgot, that other people have to read
through the whole stupid sentences i wrote;)

I met ODE two times the last half year, but i thought of the complications
of physics and fast went away. But know i have to look for these things,
which makes games interesting. (I am not one of these guys involved in the
fight for the highest triangle count and the best looking engine). I thought
about a simple thing. Do you remember System Shock from Looking Glass. Years
ago they get it to work, that a crate slides down a bevel. I want to have a
simple object on the table. A bread, a plate, something like that. And you
are able to push this item and on the edge of the table, if more than the
half hangs over... it should bounce down... and of course it should not only
simple fall straight down, it should tip over on the side hanging in the air
and get some rotational acceleration. IMPOSSIBLE, was my first thought.

I never would believe, that in fact it could be so easy. After checking out
your sources, i had only some small difficulties to compile the sources. I
used VC++ 6.0... but no service packs. I also bought a copy of VC++ 7.0, but
seldom use it. The errors came through the undefined MSVC macro, which
results in the unknown  HALF_VALF value. Then the math.h  templates do not
accept the extern "C" style. The config.h was flying around and for atoi and
strtol the stdlib.h was not included. The pathes were not set right. After
corrected these things in my copy, the projects builds fine. And when i run
the "Test_MovingTrimesh" example, my eyes were bigger and bigger.

Incredible work! Unbelievable. It runs well. The boxes fall and take their
way. Sometimes they stands angled because of another box. Sometimes they
pushed other boxes around in such a real way. During debugging my eyes went
bigger and bigger. The code is clean structured, well written and good
commented. The function catalogue is small and easy to manage. The base data
types are plain defined. I bow low to you. When i found the last
documentation on the web site, i was complete happy. After reading only a
quarter i have already some understanding about rigid bodies in general and
your implementation in special. Thanks a lot. Now to the question (long way
to go, hm?)

First i must come clear with the license. You mentioned two on the site. Can
i choose one of them or do i have to adhere to both?

Second, our target platform will be Win32 (this time). For that i will
shrunk the code even more. When i do so, do you want to have an update from
me for the VC60/70 code path? Should i leave the structure in the base ode
files? They are fine, but i am prefer classes or - even better - templates.
Can you live with such a conversion? I saw, internally you use already
classes, but for the border between lib/dll and program it's necessary to
use simple functions. But i think about a library like ATL. (At work i am
heavily involved in ATL and templates, so i am a friend of this).

This is all for the first time and more than enough, i think. I promise, the
next mails will only touch coding problems and therefore short sentences...
Sorry, if someone was angry about a long but not very helpful message.
Thanks to all, who worked on this project and good luck for the future.

br, =Cy=