[ODE] some quick notes on 0.6...

John Miles jmiles at pop.net
Wed Jun 21 22:08:20 MST 2006


- The Win32 test programs don't run with ODE.DLL because export-dif.h is
missing the surrounding 'ifdef __cplusplus extern "C" { ... }' clause.  I'm
not sure why this worked before; it might be an artifact of my attempt to
keep using the 0.5 makefile with the new 0.6 stuff.  My build system is
neither fish nor fowl at this point, so this may not affect anyone but me...
but I'd still suggest adding the extern "C" clause to export-dif.h for
consistency's sake.

- Along those lines, I'm not crazy about the loss of the MSVC makefiles,
although in general the new Win32 build setup seems really nice.  Guess they
had to be sacrificed for the greater good.  It was nice to see the .def
files gone!

- Wow, that convex collider primitive is broken.  Seriously not ready for
prime time.  Did anyone actually try it in test-boxstack?  Not only do
convex-convex collisions not work at all -- a situation alluded to by the
comments in convex.cpp -- but the convex pieces promptly disable themselves
after hitting the ground, and aren't re-enabled when boxes hit them.
(Sphere collisions seem to re-enable them, but not boxes.)

- I thought flat cylinders weren't going to be promoted to a first-class
type until they could collide with each other...?

In general I don't think much of including half-baked primitives like the
convex-hull and flat-cylinder types in the core library while the
dTerrainY/dTerrainZ contributions still have to be integrated by hand.  (And
that process is not becoming any easier, as Benoit's ODE 0.039-based
instructions become more and more dated.)  The argument that they aren't
worthy of promotion to the core library due to their hardwired Y-up/Z-up
nature falls flat on its face, given the twitchy code that apparently *is*
being promoted these days.

Just some random thoughts.  Despite the major improvements in the new build
process, this release is not likely to leave ODE newbies with a good first
impression.

-- jm
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