Real-Time Physics Simulation Forum

Hmm it does appear to be "locked". Probably it was to do with vandelism or spam. Since that defeats the point of a wiki I'm sure it can be changed at least for some users. It would be a great shame for the core bullet devs to pass up this opportunity for the community to get together and do something useful.

Mostly I make stuff protected out of habit unless there's a really really good reason to make it private. Additionally, btMotionState is what you should really be inheriting from, not chunky's-ogre-motionstate. I guess it's not inconcievable that you'd want to access the scenenode, though, if you were inheriting from it.

Regarding the wiki being locked, this was discussed in the past [the whole wiki-documentation thing], and Erwin said that we should register and he could add permission to edit it on a per-user basis. I started this thread mostly as a reminder of that past discussion, and to see if there was any news on the topic.

Gary (-;

Hehe yes I know to inherit from btMotionState, I'm not using Orge even.

Another question Chunky, why would you not assign your m_pos1 to the arguemnt's value in setWorldTransform() ?

Thanks for offering help, it would be good to improve the Wiki with documentation.

I want keep some control of the content on the Wiki frontpage, but you can make suggestions and get some links to start from the frontpage.
Have you checked this wiki? http://www.opentissue.org/wikitissue/in ... /Main_Page

Can you reply or PM with your Wiki login names, so I can give you Wiki write access ? (please make sure to have the exact names with proper capitals)
Thanks,
Erwin

by the way, we could try to gather at some time at an IRC channel, such as freenode.net, #bulletphysics for example.

we could try to gather at some time at an IRC channel, such as freenode.net, #bulletphysics for example.

Sounds good. I'll begin lurking there. Checking chanserv, it seems you've been here before...

22:21 <Chunky_Ks> info #bulletphysics
22:21 -ChanServ(ChanServ@services.)- Information on #bulletphysics:
22:21 -ChanServ(ChanServ@services.)- Founder : erwin_bullet
22:21 -ChanServ(ChanServ@services.)- Registered : Oct 13 20:22:18 2007 (44 weeks, 3 days, 05:56:56 ago)
22:21 -ChanServ(ChanServ@services.)- Last used : Oct 24 04:27:04 2007 (42 weeks, 6 days, 21:52:10 ago)
22:21 -ChanServ(ChanServ@services.)- Mode lock : +ntc-s
22:21 -ChanServ(ChanServ@services.)- URL : http://bulletphysics.com
22:21 -ChanServ(ChanServ@services.)- *** End of Info ***

Gary (-;

I've always wanted a bullet IRC channel

We need a critical mass of people before it actually starts to "live" though.

erwin: maybe you can advertise it through whatever means you usually use?


edit: #ode only has 6 people including me and a bot, so the competition is not strong :p

#ode is fairly dead though. #ogre3d has 99 people for instance, but you only get that big after years of growth.

A bunch of us started a channel for warwick university on quakenet 7 years ago. It started with 3 people but after a few years was in the 40s so it's possible to grow fast if the time is right and the need is there.

my wiki username is sparkprime, same as the forum username

Well, all of bulletthings.pdf is now in the wiki: http://www.bulletphysics.com/mediawiki- ... umentation

While I'm on the subject, is there any chance that the stylesheet for the wiki could be modified so that the <h3>-equivalent "===" doesn't have the same color as links? It drives me insane because I keep trying to click on stuff, and it doesn't work...

Gary (-;

Let's keep the discussion about wiki/documentation discussion in this forum topic, and use the issue tracker at bullet.googlecode.com to file and track specific issues that need work. Here is one issue that tracks several wiki requests

• Documentation needs to be verified, to make sure that the information is really correct. We need to create some guideline/workflow for this.
• It takes a bit of time to update the Mediawiki software/style sheets. Upgrading Mediawiki requires PHP 5.x, but the current Bullet website is hosted by a provider that only has PHP 4.x. We will look into alternatives for the wiki software.
• Core documentation should be agnostic to a graphics engine. So any reference to Ogre, Irlicht, Unreal Engine, Direct3D should be kept in a seperate section.

Thanks for your help so far,
Erwin

Documentation needs to be verified, to make sure that the information is really correct. We need to create some guideline/workflow for this.

Well, I guess part of the question is, who out there is technically qualified to do this, and who has the time for it? Does mediawiki have a way to flag edited pages for administrators to look at?

Core documentation should be agnostic to a graphics engine. So any reference to Ogre, Irlicht, Unreal Engine, Direct3D should be kept in a seperate section.

Such as the motionstates page. Thing is, it's often hard to document stuff without examples, and by the very nature of motionstates, there's no such thing as a sample without reference to a rendering system. I'm not sure how that could be resolved - making it necessary to read a separate rendering-engine-specific page to understand something in the graphics-engine-agnostic section feels awkward. I guess I could just replace "Ogre::SceneNode *" references to "your_games_node_position_thing *" references, but that doesn't really feel any better?

Thinking about it, how many things that are rendering-engine-related will there eventually be? It seems like the odd sample code snippet using ogre [since that's what Spark & I are using] wouldn't be a problem, but larger swathes of ogre-specific stuff would live as a document in their own right, anyway.

It takes a bit of time to update the Mediawiki software/style sheets. Upgrading Mediawiki requires PHP 5.x, but the current Bullet website is hosted by a provider that only has PHP 4.x. We will look into alternatives for the wiki software.

As a stopgap solution, perhaps it would be possible to update to the most recent version of mediawiki that works with PHP4? It'd be a little more work in the long run, but the current stylesheet and race condition are pretty prohibitive, to reading and editing respectively.

Gary (-;

Well, I guess part of the question is, who out there is technically qualified to do this, and who has the time for it? Does mediawiki have a way to flag edited pages for administrators to look at?

I'll deal with the review for now, it would have been nice if the Wiki had an automatic way of telling what page needs review. Current Mediawiki 1.5.8 is latest for PHP 4.

Such as the motionstates page. Thing is, it's often hard to document stuff without examples, and by the very nature of motionstates, there's no such thing as a sample without reference to a rendering system. I'm not sure how that could be resolved - making it necessary to read a separate rendering-engine-specific page to understand something in the graphics-engine-agnostic section feels awkward. I guess I could just replace "Ogre::SceneNode *" references to "your_games_node_position_thing *" references, but that doesn't really feel any better?

I prefer to have a separate section with graphics renderer integration topics, independent from the core physics documentation. Apart from this, it is probably helpful for documentation writers to check out the Open Dynamics Engine, Box2D and OpenTissue documentation/Wiki's for some inspiration.

Minor note: 'Bullet' starts with a capital B so it is not 'bullet'. I'll try to help a bit with the docs and provide some more feedback in this topic.
Thanks,
Erwin

Doesn't this kind of defeat the point of a wiki? To have everything filter thru one guy before it's added?

I understand the desire to have the documentation be accurate, but the point of a wiki is to have everyone be editing and contributing to it directly. You can review the changes and fix or remove them as needed.

I think you'll find that it works out better...

I think the point of it was that someone knowlegable can correct it after it's added. You'll notice there's a whole bunch of stuff up there now, for example

Gary (-;

Doesn't this kind of defeat the point of a wiki? To have everything filter thru one guy before it's added?

This will not be 'one guy', we try to get several of the developers involved in the review of the Wiki / documentation.

I think the point of it was that someone knowlegable can correct it after it's added.

Exactly, the documentation needs to be reviewed after it has been added. The biggest issue is that we have no automated way to make it easy to recognize what information has been reviewed and what hasn't. So ideally, people can edit/add content and it shows up as unreviewed. As soon as a developed reviewed it, it shows up as 'reviewed' content.

Anyone who is interested in adding documentation can just ask. There is no public editing because we had spam before.
Hope this helps,
Erwin