AW: [ODE] C# Access [Axiom offtopic]

[Torsten Stein]

Hi Ben!

> ...

You are quite right with your points. Progess in that project slowed down
extremly the last weeks, but I'm sure that's because the main developer
(leed)
had some own problems. He put his note "back from the dead" when he got
regular internet access again. At the moment he's waiting for the next
"official" tao release that the new CVS thinks should be based on.

> * It seems kind of surprising that an entire game engine can be written
> over ODE without any trace or signs of activity showing up on the ODE
> mailing list. At the least, a notification email saying "Axiom are
> adapting ODE to C#" would be nice.

It's not the entire game engine that's written over ODE. ODE (or to be more
general "physics") is one part that can be used inside that engine. Like
particles or audio or the gui. Just one of the original axiom demos uses
physics. All the others runs without physics.

I did not post on the ode mailing list (at least until now) about my work,
because the physics part is based on David Walkers managed wrapper. I made
lots of bug fixes in that code. But best way would to give these code
changes
back to David, so that he can make a new "official" release of his wrapper.
There are people out there that want to use his wrapper and have problems
with it, so a new release might help out some of these guys. But I did not
get any responses from David. So at this moment I'm not quite sure how I
should
deal with that and how to make my code changes publicly available.

> I'd post this message to Axiom too (where it needs to go) if it had a
> suitable mailing list...

Yes, there's no mailing list. Communication is forum based.

> PS A question - What, precisely is that nature of Axiom's
> interaction/dependency with the platform graphics libraries?  I
> understand it uses Tao (OpenGL bindings), yet in the FAQ, it states that
> it needs DirectX 9. Is it DirectX or OpenGL based, or both?

The demos work like that: At the start you can choose your your platform
(DirectX or OpenGL), resultion, full-screen or not. So, both platforms
are supported. And as far as i know (did not tried it myself) they get it
running on linux with mono! At the moment physics would definetely not
work under Linux because of the way the wrapper works.

Torsten