Odejava project's next steps

Game Mechanics
#1

Greetings fellow ODE / Odejava developers,

I started Odejava project many years ago and it has been a looong time since I have participated to Odejava project. As of today I am a bit surprised that I could not found any good alternative for Odejava. It must be that I did not search too well but I also noticed that too many are having ** mind boggling issues ** getting the damn project compiled let alone use it productively. Also, developing with Odejava should be more fun and cause less hair loss…

I’d like to give it a try to provide solid getting started tutorial including demos that just work out of the box. For example, native binaries absolutely must be precompiled for windows, linux and mac platforms, most people should not need to worry about these.

Now, there are some things that I’d like to discuss with Odejava enthusiastics but before that happens I’d like to know which people are most interested of Odejava today and which people have contributed to Odejava previously and have some motivation to answer to my questions.

If you feel you can contribute in any way, please contact me asap!

PS. If you want to make sure your email is not eaten by spambot add odejava to subject line, thanks…

–
Jani Laakso, Project Manager, IT Mill Ltd
http://dev.itmill.com | Mobile: + 358 40 589 8086 | Skype: janilaakso
Email: jani.laakso@itmill.com

#2

Hi, I’ve done 100% pure Java port of Bullet physics library: JBullet. Clearly this is not ODE :slight_smile: though I saw that some code is propagated from ODE to original Bullet. There is also JOODE (also search for JOODE there on JGO), which is port of ODE, though it seems it’s not progressing too much lately.

#3

Wow, have to look this too! For me, name is a bit misguiding giving first impression that it’s related to bullet physics simulation only :slight_smile: Obviously this is not the case.

Best of luck with this, I really like that this one is pure java! Doing solid physics library for games is a big job.

#4

Hi Jani, good to see you around and you are still interested in your baby :smiley:

Currently only Herwin (cvs login harsens) is working on ODEJava. I have restructured and improved it a little in the past. But I think that’s it, regarding contributions in the last years.

Currently there is no actual alternative imo. jBullet, while very promising, still has issues with joints (no translational axes, rotational not that flexible), JOODE is very incomplete, jPhysX… well I don’t like PhysX :P, and so on.
We are using ODEJava as most important implementation for jME Physics 2.

Re your proposals: Tutorial would surely be great. Having the binaries precompiled for the development version is nice, yes. I tried to provide those (with jME community help) in the past. At least for the releases this was successful. But if you don’t have all the platform available yourself it’s a pain to make them for the development version each time you change the natives.

I’d be happy to discuss ODEJava’s future :slight_smile:

#5

Oh, forgot to mention that the website odejava.org is really in a bad shape (content wise and control - spam! - wise). I was not even able to get an account :o and let William provide that with admin rights.

P.S. even worse: it’s suspended again :’(

#6

Great to see you get back in Ode development again.

As for the current status of Odejava, a month or so ago I fixed up Odejava so that it compiles with ode 0.10. I cleaned up the documentation whenever I ran into inaccuracies and I added some ODE stuff that I needed that wasn’t Odejava yet. Other than that and the changes Irrisor mentioned, not a whole lot has happened. I’m all for setting up a binary release of the current version though.

I started doing some Odejava tutorials to help our students get started (see http://www.herwinvanwelbergen.nl/index.php?selected=odejava). Maybe that helps a bit for comprehensive demos? Ultimately I was planning to make it a Nehe-like tutorial collection, if I can find the time for it.

I tried contacting Will about the website, but haven’t heard from him.

#7

I was returning to my Java game development and noticed OdeJava was suspended. I’m happy to hear you’re alive and well, Jani. Yes, if you can find the time to educate your port of Ode to us, we would certainly appreciate it.

I’m also please to see other physic engine ports such as JBullet to the fray. (Very impressive in my opinion.) I will definitely give it a try.

Overall, we all appreciate your efforts.

#8

It would be good to improve any outstanding issues in JBullet and its parent Bullet.

Did you report those issues already to jezek2? Is the btSliderConstraint not ported yet?
Thanks,
Erwin

#9

Well, you’ve seen my post on bulletphysics.com boards. I thought jesek2 would see it, too. I did not report it to him directly (and there is no issue tracker afaik).