The new Bullet 2.76 SDK includes several new features and improvements. The new btInternalEdgeUtility avoid collisions against internal edges for smooth sliding along a triangle mesh. The cross-platform cmake build system support is improved and preparations are made towards upcoming OpenCL GPU acceleration for Bullet 3.x.
The new binary file format improves current and future tools support for Bullet.
The extensible .bullet file serialization is cross-compatible between 32/64bit, little and big endian, single and double precision and different Bullet SDK versions. This means you can export a .bullet file in Maya 64bit on a little endian Intel machine and import it on a 32bit big endian PlayStation 3.
January 12th marks the official release date of the PC kart game Zero Gear by NimbleBit! For the low price of only $19.99 you can beat up your friends in 18 different levels, in customizable karts and characters. Play with physically based weapons, earn achievements and compete in many different game modes.
It uses Bullet for its physics and Ogre 3D for graphics rendering.
Play either one of the 4 characters of Cocoto’s world and go fishing for treasures in one of the 4 magical environments of this famous series: Abyss, Atlantis, Jungle and Heaven. Watch out, each world will have its own challenges and gifts!
Jay Roth President, 3D Product Division at NewTek. 2009-12-08. “DYNAMICS: Functionality based on the popular Open Source Bullet Physics Library, one of the best physics libraries on the market today.
Kester reports that Madagascar Kartz uses Bullet and an improved version of its btRaycastVehicle in their upcoming 4-player splitscreen racing game. He also shares some experiences on how to improve the vehicle simulation. The Dreamworks franchise is published by Activition and is available from October 27th for all game consoles. Check out the YouTube video.
“We are also using a modified version of an open source physics engine called Bullet Physics Library to calculate our physics simulation and collision inside the game. We have in-house optimized it for the Xbox 360 CPU and vector units. Our game engine is designed to be fully multithreaded, and we are simulating physics at the same time we are processing game logic, graphics, sound and particles in other Xbox 360 hardware threads. With extensive optimization, we have achieved a very good balance, with all six CPU hardware threads constantly working under heavy load.”
The August 2009 issue of Game Developers Magazine features an article about game middleware, written by Mark Deloura. They surveyed over 100 senior developers of various development houses, mainly working on PC, PlayStation 3 or XBox 360.
According to the article, developers like having access to the full source code. When purchasing a Havok or PhysX license, some of the core algorithmic implementations, such as the core constraint solver or collision detection internals are not exposed. PhysX is rated number 1 at 26.8%, Havok comes 2nd at 22.7%, Bullet third at 10.3% and Open Dynamics Engine fourth at 4.1%.
“We use it for our character controller (our own custom one), line of sight checks, and so forth as well as for vehicle physics in the Racing and Demolition Derby instances.”
We have been working for a while on parallel physics optimizations for various platforms. As part of the Math and Physics Tutorial on Tuesday March 24th, Takahiro Harada and Erwin Coumans will do a joint presentation that discusses our experiences how to optimize a rigid body physics pipeline for CUDA, SPU, Larrabee and OpenCL.
A preview of the CUDA constraint solver for Bullet can be downloaded here, or watch the Youtube movie if you don’t have an NVidia card with CUDA 2.1 installed.
Bullet 2.74 physics sdk has been released and can be downloaded from the Google Code website.
Constraint debug visualization has been added to make it easier to setup constraint limits. Other improvements include SIMD constraint solving, buoyancy demos, single-shot multiple contact point generation, improved documentation etc.
“We are also using a modified version of an open source physics engine called Bullet Physics Library to calculate our physics simulation and collision inside the game. We have in-house optimized it for the Xbox 360 CPU and vector units. Our game engine is designed to be fully multithreaded, and we are simulating physics at the same time we are processing game logic, graphics, sound and particles in other Xbox 360 hardware threads. With extensive optimization, we have achieved a very good balance, with all six CPU hardware threads constantly working under heavy load.”
The August 2009 issue of Game Developers Magazine features an article about game middleware, written by Mark Deloura. They surveyed over 100 senior developers of various development houses, mainly working on PC, PlayStation 3 or XBox 360.
