BEPUphysics

please can you make it so i can draw displayObjects in my own effect?
also do you fancy turning up the tessellation on cylinder/cone/etc while you're there? they aren't too convincing at close range.

In v0.4.0, due to a bit of a graphics overhaul, the draw method is now draw(Effect effect, Matrix view, Matrix projection), so you can pass in your own effect (or let the new EntityRenderer take care of everything). If the passed in effect is a BasicEffect, the world, view, and projection matrices are automatically set- but not otherwise.

There's also a getVertices() method for all DisplayObjects now which recalculates and returns a VertexPositionNormalTexture array. This is used internally (but could be used externally) for CPU instancing for convex polyhedra, the new Box primitive, and triangles.

I should be able to get the quadric shapes a bit more pleasing to the eye as well, though it hasn't been implemented yet. I've had enough of oogly spheres too.

sounds good. lies?

Don't worry too much about yoshi-spam.

Whats going on?

If you mean with the engine, many good things v0.4.0 has gotten a little bigger than previously planned, but it's looking like its for the better.

is version 4 coming soon? also has there been progress on collision of small spheres on big triangles please?

It should be coming in the next week or two- probably in a week, barring catastrophic bugs. Of course, now that I've said that, I'm probably doomed.

There's only so much I can do in regards to the extreme cases where single point precision just doesn't quite cut it, but there have been some changes made to the collision detection that should both increase speed and deal with numerical error better. Larger default margins and continuous collision detection should improve robustness as well.

This version does support heightmaps (and static geometry groups), so it may be easy enough to simply split gigantic triangles in smaller ones if the larger type continue to cause issues.

ok. i didnt really explore splitting the triangles. thats fine. ta very much. i'll send you a demo some time. might be useful for testing?

Sure, always helps.

Looks like I'm going to be exposing the display system entirely. I've decided that there's not much reason to combine it into the BEPUphysics.dll itself, so in v0.4.0 the demos will include the source of the display system as well (essentially, the display source will be moved into open source under a permissive zlib-style license like the rest of the demo source).

Additionally, it will include GPU instancing for speedier rendering. This is a bit of a change, as you can't simply pass in a different effect to draw GPU instanced entities. However, all of the code will still be in place for non-GPU instanced drawing, so you can fall back and use it with custom effects (and with all of the display/effect source, you can change it up however you want anyway).

As for a release, I'm aiming for wednesday, but I might miss and hit thursday or friday.

---And of course, wednesday is here, and I'm fairly confident it's not going to be ready today. Some non-engine related problems have come up that are slowing things down. A late friday, saturday release is still possible if things work out in my favor.

I figured I'd give an update - I'm now wrapping everything up and should have it out the door in the next 48 hours.

I'll also be doing a media update, including these two videos:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=wXj5p1s4Au4
http://youtube.com/watch?v=-m9z_AJCiX4

teh removed?

Yeah, I replaced the super pyramid. The six tiny little balls were almost invisible, so I re-rendered it with more obvious destruction. That, and stuff was falling off the side due to the platform being too small.

The three videos are in the media section, or for quicklinkness:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ibRpR3H7LJ0
http://youtube.com/watch?v=-syj2Yclg8Y
http://youtube.com/watch?v=wXj5p1s4Au4

looks amazing. Super Pyramid frame rate?