[ODE] Freezing Problems in ODE.

[Matthew Nunya]

I have been playing around with ODE for a year or so now and have recently
decided to do something useful with it. I'm currently witting a DLL so that
I can do some simple physics in "Game Maker" (if you haven't heard of it,
it's basically a scripting engine of sorts, like Blitz). However, I keep
running into a nagging problem that won't go away, and I'm sure it isn't
Game Maker that's causing it. I could be simulating only a couple of bodies
and joints and everything will be running quite smoothly at 60 fps, then at
random everything will freeze and my entire system will hang for a few
seconds before returning back to normal and running smoothly. This could
happen anytime, it doesn't only occur when things collide.

I have done my best to try and narrow down what's causing it but my attempts
have been fruitless. I have played with ERP, CFM, step sizes, and other
configurations for hours to no avail.

What I do know about my problem is that when ever it occurs, the processor
load spikes at 100% for the duration of the freeze and my hard drive will
only rev slightly near the end of the freeze. It's very slightly, because
I'm not running out of physical memory and windows doesn't need to resort to
virtual memory. In fact, the simulation's memory doesn't change at all. It
isn't leaking any memory to the best of my knowledge. I am at a real loss as
to why it happens.

I was wondering if anyone else as experienced this problem and if so, I
would be incredibly curious to know how to correct it. Any help of advice
anyone could offer would be infinitely appreciated.

Just in case it helps, this is the system I'm running on:

WinXP (SP2) / Athlon64 3400+ / 1GB Ram / EIDE 160 GB HD
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