IrrODE - an Irrlicht - ODE wrapper (now with SVN)

[Brainsaw]

Sorry for the late reply, I did not have time to work on any homebrew software for the last couple of months. I'll check for the missing directory and include it (promise )

[opticdrive]

What is irrode released as for a license? I will be using irrlicht (zlib/libpng license) and ODE (BSD-style license).

[Brainsaw]

IrrODE itself is released under the terms of the Irrlicht license, but as ODE is not my work you still have to comply with the license the author has chose (or chose one of the licenses). But ODE does also use a very liberal license IIRC.

[newleon]

Hi Brainsaw

About one year ago, I tried to use irrOde for developing a driving simulator for my research in university. I failed to use it, which instead I tried IPhysics (a physics wrapper based on Newton Game Dynamics). It has a simple and easy to use design but its quality is not that good. I am looking for an alternative, this irrOde is my first option. I tried several versions of irrOde with both ode-0.11 and ode-0.12. In all cases, after compiling the irrOdeCar, and then running it, I get a frozen window which I cannot do anything. You have mentioned this in one of your posts as Gimbal Lock:

OK, some little information about the progress: although I didn't upload a new version for some weeks I'm still working on the project. A user in the german Irrlicht forum reported that some files are missing in the archive, so I think I'll do a new upload this evening (after modifying my script that creates the archive ), but in general I'm stuck at a point: under certain circumstances the IrrOdeCar demo stops working. I get this reproduced by rotating the helicopter to (0,90,0). From a thread I started on the ODE mailing list I know that this is a Gimbal Lock, I just haven't (yet) found a solution for the problem, but I'm working on it. Might take some time though, because I suck in maths .

I tried to not load helicopter in the demo, but nothing is changed. In another post you said adjust the initial rotation in a way to not cause Gimbal Lock. I do not know how to apply this solution to the current irrodecar demo. I tried to change the initial rotation of the helicopter, nothing is changed again.

I finally found a way around the gimbal lock problem in the IrrOdeCar demo. The current demo is working again. If you use IrrOde in your project you should just make sure that the initial rotation of a body does not cause a gimbal lock. It works, but it causes some jittering.

Serengeor has mentioned something else:

I think your demo is missing frame rate independent movement, it seems really slow on 1000 fps.

I think he is right. The window is not frozen completely. If I try to move the window, after 1 or 2 minutes it responses to my action (I mean the window moves).

I do not know how to solve this problem. I really want to use this irrOde wrapper, but every time I refer to it I fail to use it. Please make it clear how to overcome this problem. For your information, I am using Windows 7, VS 2008, and I follow the instructions to compile both ode and irrode.

PS: I almost forgot to say Merry Christmas.

[Brainsaw]

Hi,

I got no clue what's the problem. I am using CodeBlocks (8.02) with MinGW (and I got it working there), I didn't try to compile it using VC in a long time. I'll give it a try at home, and I'll post an answer as soon as I find something. Greetings,

Brainsaw

[Brainsaw]

I just remembered: I never actually got the IrrOdeCar demo running in the VS version ... horrible performance, and I'm not sure if anything has changed since my last try. I'll give it a test nevertheless.

[Brainsaw]

Happy new year. I checked the issue, but all I can say is that the performance with the VC compiled version is just horrible. Unfortunately I don't have the time to dig deeper into this, so I can't provide a solution except for switching to mingw maybe (which delivers a performance that is OK).