[Opensim-dev] Using ODE for vehicles and ragdolls

[Mircea Filipescu]

These vids look awesome. I was mainly surprised to see it possible to "link"prims together that way to make them stick to each other like that... that's entirely unique for Second Life. If it matters any I made a topic regarding vehicles over here in the past http://osgrid.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=74&p=190&hilit=vehicle#p190 so feel free to check it out and post there too if it's of any relevance. And personally from what I seen, I believe ODE is just perfect for vehicles although of course those who know the deeper code know much better then me. Hope to see more of this soon... it all looks awesome so far :)

Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:11:08 +0900
From: nlin.message at gmail.com
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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