[ODE] Ragdoll performance with OpenDE

[Mohsin Hasan]

Hi,

I'm new to OpenDE. I've done some work with Tokamak but I really like the
feature set offered by ODE so I thought of switching to ODE. I tried to
implement a Ragdoll demo with ODE with 10 Bones (9 joints). The demo seems
to work fine. The only issue I have is performance. I mean I create 5
Ragdolls and the performance of the simulation starts to stall. I haven't
done anything fancy yet, just added simple hinge joints. ODE is built in
single precision mode, MAX_CONTACT points for collision is only 3 and I am
using dWorldStepFast1 method with only 8 iterations to get extra bit of
speed but nothing seems to help. On the other hand my Tokamak demo can
easily manage 40 Ragdolls (same configuration) without any major hiccups. 

My question is. Is ODE not suitable to implement Ragdoll or commercial
quality game physics yet due to speed constraints? Is there anything being
done to increase the performance? I know there are a few experimental
functions to auto disable bodies like in Tokamak but this will only help
once a body is in a resting state. If most of the objects (Ragdolls) are
moving (falling) speed is just unbearably slow.

Regards,
Mohsin