All in all - no one is happier than me that this engine is available since I'm all into managed code rather than native. Keep up the good work, and thank you for the impressive efforts.
Glad it's working for you
I'm very impressed by you library, especially since serious, managed physics engines are quite uncommon. Have you (or someone else) done any comparisons to other engines, like Bullet/BulletSharp, Jitter etc? I'm thinking of feture sets and perfomance. How do you consider BEPU compared to "giants" like PhysX and Havok?
I haven't personally done direct benchmarking between engines, since:
1) There's enough known low hanging fruit remaining such that comparisons don't provide much more development guidance.
2) It would be very hard to tune the other engine as well as I could tune BEPUphysics for the benchmark, since I would be ignorant of their best practices.
3) It makes me feel a bit gross!
Just from having played with it at one point, though, I believe Bullet (CPU version) and BEPUphysics aren't very far apart in performance. Plus or minus 50% depending on the simulation, maybe. The error bars are pretty huge since the goal of playing with it wasn't to benchmark anything.
I have to assume PhysX and Havok have a significant lead in performance, but it's hard to say exactly how much. The fact that they have a dedicated team of smart people and man-decades of development effort in their engines would imply they've already eaten up all of the 'easy' opportunities I'm aware of (not that Bullet isn't made by a bunch of smart people, but the conditions are a bit different!). Top it off with native code and an optimizing compiler, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear they were at least twice as fast. But then I see
things like this and I get a little confused. I believe it's an older version of PhysX, and I don't know much about the benchmark details, but it's still very surprising to see BEPU providing comparable or better per-thread performance in any test.
Feature wise, BEPUphysics tends to stick to a core rigid body featureset. I haven't been able to justify CPU simulated fluids or soft bodies in terms of effect/performance/development effort. I suspect that feature gap will stay for quite a while since our main project wouldn't benefit much from them.