[Opensim-dev] Using ODE for vehicles and ragdolls

[Frisby, Adam]

This is very cool -

How are you assigning vehicle parameters, etc?

Adam

From: opensim-dev-bounces at lists.berlios.de [mailto:opensim-dev-bounces at lists.berlios.de] On Behalf Of nlin (message)
Sent: Tuesday, 18 November 2008 6:11 PM
To: opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
Subject: [Opensim-dev] Using ODE for vehicles and ragdolls

Hello,

There's been some discussion about SL-compatible vehicles in OpenSim recently, with its higher-level abstraction of how vehicles work. This would have the long-term goals of compatibility and ability to swap out physics engines while still using the same vehicle layer.

SL-compatibility and abstracting vehicles from the physics engine are good goals for the long term; sort of a top-down approach (start with the vehicle abstraction, map it to many different physics engines).

Complementary to this, I'd like to explore and start discussion of an alternative way of handling vehicles by using a bottom-up approach. Starting with the specific physics engine of ODE, can we use ODE-specific features to make simple vehicles?

I did some experiments with OpenSim and ODE and the answer seems to be yes, we can make simple vehicles with ODE by using joints. We can also make ragdolls. I posted some videos to YouTube of the preliminary results:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYIh-eIwmjs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9bedzIuxdM

This is only prototype work for now, put together sort of quickly as a proof-of-concept with just enough "plumbing" (data flow) to work. There are a number of issues that need to be solved for this to work cleanly. As far as I know (please correct me if I'm wrong) there hasn't been much work done to try to get ODE joints/vehicles/ragdolls working in OpenSim, but I think it's an avenue worth exploring.

Is there interest in pursuing this approach for OpenSim vehicles? I would look forward to discussing some of the issues that would need to be solved.

Thanks,
N Lin (nlin)
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