Hi, my first post here and I have some general questions about how well you guys think BEPU physics will suite my needs for my game idea. I can start by telling you that I've never worked with any physics library before. I'm making this game using XNA and am targeting both xbox and pc. Now, about the game.
The game will be an arcade action shooter where the play will control a character almost topdown, walking around shooting stuff more or less. The physics is important because I want to have a highly destructible world and realistic world. I would presume a normal gameplay sequence would have about 20 characters on the screen at anytime, lots of bullets and maybe 50-100 "debris objects", such as cars, barrels, crates etc. Would BEPU physics deliver this kind of performance to allow this? Would BEPU physics give me the tools for the job?
Thankful for any insight in the capabilities of BEPU physics.
Is BEPU Physics for me?
Re: Is BEPU Physics for me?
Performance wise, it will be fine on the PC. The Xbox360's performance under the compact framework is significantly worse, so you'd have to be a bit more careful on that platform. 100+ active, highly interactive (stacking) objects on top of a triangle mesh could cause a performance hit on the xbox, though precautions such as offloading the physics to another thread (or using the upcoming internally multithreaded system), lowering solver quality, and letting objects sleep faster should minimize the problem.
As for the tools, what kind of things do you think you'll need? There's terrains, static triangle meshes, the various entity types and compoundbodies, accelerated raycasts, character controllers, vehicles, and a bunch more.
As for the tools, what kind of things do you think you'll need? There's terrains, static triangle meshes, the various entity types and compoundbodies, accelerated raycasts, character controllers, vehicles, and a bunch more.
Re: Is BEPU Physics for me?
Thanks for the reply, it seems BEPU is more then capable to handle my needs (atleast from the little I have managed to play around with so far) and I must say the API is very easy to use and well designed GREAT WORK!, although more user-guide like documentation had been great.
I dont know if I can somehow take advantage of some facts about the game, for instance I'm not planning on continous stacking objects, I guess I more need to toggle the physics on/off. As an example, consider a car. The car is a "static" object that the player can collide against and fire at. But once the car takes to much damage I turn the car and maybe some debris into dynamic objects to simulate the explosion, once the debris and the car is resting again I no longer need the car or the objects as either physical or dynamic objects so I can remove them from the simulation all together. I dont know know If I make my point clear but I need more "temporary physics" then always 100 dynamic physics objects alive.
I dont know if I can somehow take advantage of some facts about the game, for instance I'm not planning on continous stacking objects, I guess I more need to toggle the physics on/off. As an example, consider a car. The car is a "static" object that the player can collide against and fire at. But once the car takes to much damage I turn the car and maybe some debris into dynamic objects to simulate the explosion, once the debris and the car is resting again I no longer need the car or the objects as either physical or dynamic objects so I can remove them from the simulation all together. I dont know know If I make my point clear but I need more "temporary physics" then always 100 dynamic physics objects alive.
Re: Is BEPU Physics for me?
Some more 'paradigm level' documentation is something I've been meaning to work on. A straightforward FAQ and how-to would be valuable. Right now, the documentation is a weird mix of API info and paradigms even though there's the xml documentation covering every single class, function call and public field. Hopefully I'll get some time to improve this.
In general, you won't need to worry about the deactivation too much. The automatic sleep system will do fine alone for the most part, and you can have thousands of sleeping objects in a simulation without serious problems. Temporary debris entities would be good candidates for removal from the space after their life span is up, though.
In general, you won't need to worry about the deactivation too much. The automatic sleep system will do fine alone for the most part, and you can have thousands of sleeping objects in a simulation without serious problems. Temporary debris entities would be good candidates for removal from the space after their life span is up, though.