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WILL
09-01-2005, 12:05 PM
http://www.physicsengine.com/images/newton_logo.gif

Many of you are no stranger to Newton Game Dynamics. For those that are however, it is an integrated, real time physics engine. The API provides scene management, collision detection, dynamic behavior and is said to be small, fast, stable and easy to use.


Lastest Changes in 1.31:
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Added full support for custom joints. These joints allow the application to have more control over joint functionality than the fixed set provided by the engine. A complete library of user defined joints. You can use this library as templates to implement different flavors of joints. Enhancement of the Coulomb kinetic friction. Now the Coulomb kinetic friction is isometric by default. Supports for two different friction models: the exact in which friction calculations are performed in every time step (this is the default,) and the adaptive which provides up to a 10% speed up in contact calculation depending on the number of contacts. This last model is good for simulations where the number of resting contacts is sustained a lot longer than one simulation frame, but it behaves as a frictionless engine in simulations dominated by impulsive collisions. Accuracy vs. speed solver configuration. Now the solver can be configured by the application using three different modes: exact, adaptive and linear. The exact mode is good for application where precision is more important than speed (this is the default.) In the adaptive mode the solver is not as precise but the simulation will still maintain a high degree of accuracy. This mode is good for applications were a good degree of stability is important but not as important as speed. In linear mode the application tells Newton the maximum number of passes to execute and it will terminate regardless of the constraint row acceleration error at the end of these passes.
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The following things were mentioned to look forward to in future releases:
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Porting to other platforms Animation system with motion adaptation Reduced coordinate system joint container
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The Newton Game Dynamics site is located at www.physicsengine.com ('http://www.physicsengine.com/')

Sascha Willems
09-01-2005, 05:28 PM
Since I've (more or less) taken over the header translation of NGD to delphi, you can always get the newest header version at http://newton.delphigl.de.

Since I haven't had the time to update the headers to 1.31 you'll have to wait (had to work today :( ) a bit, but I'll start updating the beta-header (which is already 1.31) right now and let you know when it's finally available.

And since I'm on the SDK-Developer team for newton, I already was using 1.31 for several weeks now and can only say that newton gets better and better. Expecially the new possibility of choosing between three solver models is a great feature.

Update :
I just did a Diff between the beta-SD-Header and the header for final 1.31 relase and there were no differences, so not much work to do.
You can now get the updated header at the above mentioned page.