[ODE] Time/Speed problem.

[Nick Carlson]

Hello everyone,

This is my first post. I'm very new to ODE, so please excuse my ignorance.
At the moment, I basically have a ragdoll setup (via OpenGL) running with
ODE. The Ragdoll is controlled by a genetically modified neural network
(AI). And everything seems to be running well.

The problem is everything is running real-time. As some of you may know,
genetic algorithms and neural networks sometimes take thousands of
iterations to train. Running these simulations with "real-time" physics is
going to take forever.

To put this into perspective, my old 800 Mhz P3 runs this simulation at
roughly the same speed as my new Athlon FX 2.8 Ghz with 2 gigs of ram.

Is there anyway to adjust the simulation so that ODE focuses on crunching
numbers, rather than worrying about real-time output?

I tried manually adjusting deltaTime in the following function:
dWorldStepFast1(theDynamicsWorldID, deltaTime, STEP_ITERATIONS);

But the when I do this, the physics become noticeably unstable. (Body parts
previously jointed together wildly flying apart, etc).

Is there anyway for me to take advantage of my powerful processor and have
ODE just crunch the numbers as fast as possible without the physics system
becoming unstable?

Thank you.
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