[ODE] Why is it that most commercial entities roll their owncollision system?

[akio]

It's been about five months since I've ported ODE into my game engine and
I'm very pleased with its great physics and collision responses.  I have
noticed in recent weeks that ODE is actually used for some commercial games.
If you take a look at the community page, you can see the links to some of
what they are.

In regards to commercial use, this engine will be definitely be a choice for
physics and collison engine.  Rendering engine, as similar to most other
games, must be written seperately.  However, I am discovering that ODE's
geom AABB information will greatly aid in developing cull hulling technique
without the need for me to compute this.  I know that OPCODE has a hull
implementation for ICE, but it's not compiled in unless you're running ICE.

Some info about how I'm using the engine:
-1st/3rd person character movements in levels created out of mesh - had to
update to an unreleased trimesh version.
-1st/3rd person vehicle controls - minor adjustments were made from the
buggy demo to reduce slippage.
-indoor/outdoor reaction are the same, engine performs superbly in both
-explosion effects triggered by geom collision and/or body force detection
-bullet hits using geom/body
-damages taken by measuring forces applied to the body
This list goes on and on.

Overall, I find the engine very powerful and I will use it in my commercial
games.

Here are a couple of mistakes to avoid in creating indoor scenes:
-verify your mesh normals are not reversed, gemos collides with normals
facing it.
-if you have layers of floors, e.g. 1st floor and 2nd flr, allow some
distance between the ceiling of the 1st floor to the floor of the 2nd flr to
avoid body colliding with both.

One satisfied user,

Akio Cullum