General questions about bullet

[jooz]

Hi,

Sorry if my questions are basic. But I am currently looking for solution for the software I am trying to develop and it might be the correct place to get some answers. First thing to know is that I am far from being an expert at all these things. I try to do my best to understand it, but it is not exactly my world.

I developped recently a kind of vehicle simulator, that I would like to upgrade with better tools available on the market.

Here is my current situation:

- I developped a basic physics engine that suits to my needs (no collision, but physics integration and, most important, some very specific physics forces modules that are custom for my particular needs). My code is written in vb.NET. I use it as a dll.
- I started to use Unity to be able to get some graphics on top of my code. So basically my dll is used by Unity to display the behaviour of my vehicle. Which means I am not using any physics engine from Unity, only the graphics and the user/player interaction capacity, and I still have the control of my physics engine.

Here is what I wanna do:

- I would like to start using a physics engine - I like Bullet because it has the soft bodies capacity - to be able to use a much more refine engine with a lot more functions available.
- I would also like to keep Unity 3d, because it seems easy enough for me to work with it.
- I am confortable coding in .NET, but not that much in c++ or any other languages.
- I want to have the capacity to later use some external libraries (.net as well) such as solvers to add some capabilities to my software.

So my questions:
- Is it possible to interact easily with Bullet in a .NET environment? I understood it was not straight forward to plug Bullet to C#.
- Is it possible to plug some specific forces modules to bullet to customize the physics engine the way I like (very specific vehicle dynamics)
- Is it still possible to get an interaction of this package with Unity?

At the end, what I ultimately want to get is a solution where I can very easily modify and customize the physics part of it by adding/changing forces modules, that suits to my needs, and do it in .NET. And also separate as much as I can the graphics part of it (Unity) to make sure I can design the interface that I like independantly.

I hope it was clear enough. Some comments/feedbacks on that would be really really helpful.

Thanks

[Misterblue]

On the .NET part of the question: I have built a C# to C++ Bullet implementation for the OpenSimulator (http://opensimulator.org) project. It is reasonably straight forward use of the PInvoke interface. You need to focus on a design that makes for one call to C++ Bullet per simulation step which minimizes most of the switching overhead.

The sources are available (BSD license) and feel free to email me if you have questions.

[kennethedward]

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