[ODE] Underwater vehicle simulation

[Megan Fox]

Well, it depends what you're doing.

ODE is a dynamics library - it's of primary usefulness if you're doing
a lot of collisions, want physical objects that can be knocked around,
etc.

Now, for an underwater game (or space sim), it doesn't seem like much
of that matters - most of what you're doing is "velocity + air (water)
drag", dead easy to code yourself, plus some minor collisions between
spheres (or maybe trimeshes, if you're wanting accurate missle impacts
or whatever).

Additionally, ODE has certain issues that make it more difficult to
use for large-scale worlds.  Underwater and space sim games often have
extremely large zones, which could make this another hurdle you'd have
to overcome.



... I'd probably use ODE myself, as I am terribly lazy and find ODE's
collision system to be handy even if I don't use the dynamics part,
but you might consider "just a collision library" if you're not
intending to leverage anything that would require complex dynamics. 
Otherwise, yeah, ODE should do you fine, you'll just need to write
your own implementation of water drag, which is just velocity
dampening at a basic/arcade level.

On 4/4/06, Emre EGE <emreege at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everybody;
> I want to make a underwater vehicle simulator.
> How can i simulate water friction and dragging in ODE?
> And i want you ask a quesion. Do you think is ODE a good choice for
> underwater simulator? Have a good day...
>
> _______________________________________________
> ODE mailing list
> ODE at q12.org
> http://q12.org/mailman/listinfo/ode
>


--
-Megan Fox
http://shalinor.circustent.us/megan/resume/