new to bullet

[tasche]

hi all!

im new to bullet physics and the first thing i noticed about this library that its seriously lacking docs/tutorials (or maybe im just too stupid too google them)...
so i started out integrating the only tut i could find (namely 'hello world') into my project. i was able to setup a terrain rigid body and it seems to work, work means if i drop other rigid bodies onto the terrain they bounce & roll as expected. however now im trying to implement a player controlled object.

as you can see my knowledge is *very* limited, and i've no clue on how to proceed, especially since i do not exactly know which demo contains what (i have almost no knowledge of collision/physics api terminology), so i dont even know where to look.

so my question is, where do i get a good base knowledge of the api (i've read the 'manual', but it seems to be a unstructured, almost random collection of facts and features).

any help is appreciated, even if its only a few keywords i should try in googling

thanks in advance,
tasche

[Erwin Coumans]

Do you have suggestions to make the pdf manual less random?

The best is to study all the demos. What do you want to achieve?
Youn can check the demo CharacterDemo for a basic character controller. Note that the btKinematicCharacterController used in that demo is just a starting point.

Thanks,
Erwin

[tasche]

wow thanks for the quick reply
ok ill start with the character demo. the reason why i didnt check out this practically named demo by myself is that it seemed a bit too advanced for my purposes, but since i will have to go through all demos anyway, i'll just start there

a really quick way to improve the user manual in my opinion would be to simply add the name of the demo focussing on the feature explained in a given paragraph.
i realize that its an api user manual, and not a lecture on 3d physics, but a glossary would be nice, too.

all in all i have to say after playing around a bit with the stuff i know, im really exited to learn more, as bullet seems to be both powerful and flexible.
i'll be sure to give more feedback about improvement on the manual...

cheers,
tasche