[ODE] Fixed stepping

[Jason Perkins]

On 8/18/06, Geoff Carlton <gcarlton at iinet.net.au> wrote:
> One thing to consider is whether it is at all feasible that ODE would be
> made to work in future with variable time steps.

Assuming that this happened, and that it for some reason was better
than the fixed steps, then we could change the internals of the step
call to ignore the number of iterations. In the current system,
everyone is doing fixed stepping manually so they wouldn't be able to
take advantage of such a (hypothetical) system.


> For these reasons, I would think that the fixed step interface would be
> better as a pure addition to the API.

I tend to agree that it should be an addition, rather than a
replacement, to the current steppers. This new hypothetical step
function would become the "official" method, used in the docs and all
the demos. This new function could skip the current steppers and call
the island processors directly (ie. dxQuickStepper) to avoid a little
overhead.

While the topic is being discussed, most users should not need to
choose a stepping function. We should pick one, and add a function
like dWorldSetStepMethod() to allow advanced users to change it if
necessary.

Jason