When I first started making the game, I went with ODE for the game physics....a few months ago I switched to Tokamak, and was a lot happier. Now, I'm moving on to the "Newton Game Dynamics" library ( http://www.physicsengine.com ). It looks so much better than both of the other libs I used. I've just yanked Tokamak out of the game, and I'm just starting to put Newton in.
I'll be able to do so much more with this library, including...yes...ragdolls. I'm hoping to have ragdoll physics on all of the characters in a couple of days. I was playing HL2 recently and I really noticed how much the physics added to the gameplay/funfactor and I decided to go all out on my game...I'll have an update on this in a few days :-)
- Dan
[Edit] - Posted a screenshot of the taxi cab, which is a re-texture of the policecar model.
I demand a post mortem when you are done. Absolutely demand it.