Make sure to get SP1 revision 2531, it includes some last minute fixes and a new VoronoiFractureDemo. We fixed some performance regression after the initial 2527 release.
Aside from numerous bug fixes, the main features are:
- A preview of the upcoming Bullet 3.x GPU rigid body pipeline, running 100% on GPU using OpenCL. Most of the implementation is thanks to Takahiro Harada at AMD. It requires a very recent GPU (5870 or newer or NVIDIA 470 or newer) with latest GPU and OpenCL drivers. A new AMD Radeon 7970 Tahiti can simulate 110k objects in real-time between 15-30 frames/second.
See Bullet/Extras/RigidBodyGpuPipeline for source or check out the Youtube videos or slides and precompiled binaries - Android/NEON optimized version of Physics Effects. This will be used as a handheld backend for Bullet 3.x. Thanks to Graham Rhodes and Anthony Hamilton for this contribution.
See Bullet/Extras/PhysicsEffects. - Option to override the number of constraint solver iterations for individual constraints. This makes it easier to attach objects together using fixed constraints. The combination of a fixed btGeneric6DofConstraint constraint with higher solver iterations, in combination with a breaking threshold is a good alternative for fracturing objects.
See Bullet/Demos/VoronoiFractureDemo for some example use of the btTypedConstraint::setOverrideNumSolverIterations method. Thanks to RBD for this demo! - The open source Dynamica Bullet Maya plugin now features deterministic/reproducable simulation playback. Also a preliminary soft body and convex decomposition using HACD is included.
See http://dynamica.googlecode.com for source code and precompiled plug-in.
Enjoy and hope to see you at the Game Developers Conference, on Tuesday March 6 at our Physics Tutorial my Destruction talk from 4:30-5:15pm and Qualcomm Developer Day where Graham Rhodes has a presentation about Bullet from 11:45a.m.-12:30p.m.
Erwin