I've noticed that there is new Newton SDK http://newtondynamics.com/downloads.html I'm using old 1.24 version with success in a commercial game development and new release has plenty of new functionality, including dedicated vehicle support, many collision primitives, fully funcitonal raycasting, standalone collision detection routines and UNIQUE feature - runtime collision primitive deformation! [Edited by - tomek_zielinski on November 22, 2004 1:06:05 PM]

Jeez, they've really grown in the 2 months since I last looked. Maybe worth another look.

General FYI to any curious observers:
Newton's philosophy is accuracy over speed. The simulation is entirely correct and doesn't use any assumptions, which seperates it from most, it not all, other major engines. However, speed does suffer, and it's not the kind of speed demon with large systems that other engines can be. But if you're looking at good simulations for simple systems, it's a good engine.

[Edited by - Promit on November 22, 2004 11:26:15 PM]

I switched to the new SDK, implemented vehicle and I can say that speed improved somehow due to new solver and collision system. I cannot give excat numbers because my renderer is a bottleneck, but whole game became 'less jaggy'

I was using both ODE and Newton. The only advantages of ODE are that it's open-source and faster. But this speed comes at price of being unstable most of the time and require tweaking, hacking etc.

Of course if you've learned how to cope with ODE you may be happy with it, but in my opinion Newton is much more powerful.

First, solver is exact, stable and accurate with 'normal' input, most of the time no need to tweak anything.

Second, plenty of collision primitives(null, boxes, spheres, ellipsoids, cylinders, capped cylinders, chamfer cylinders, cones, general convex hulls, triangle meshes, user-defined meshes). Collisions are exact, no problems like with ODE. Unique feature is that you can apply distortion matrix to any primitive to compensate its speed or to achieve some special effects(for example crouching player)

Third - vehicle container - just plug and play, adjust vehicle parameters and you have your own arcade Collin. With more sophisticated setup you can achieve even moderate complexity simulation.

Fourth - character support - unique UpVector joint for keeping you character straight up without hacking and builtin dedicated ragdoll support

Fifth - builtin general raycasting for whole world and individual rigid body

Besides: powerful in my opinion material interaction, user defined joints and continuos collision coming soon, and what is extremely imnporoitant for me - very active community, fast replies from developers, fast bug fixes if you find any problem

and all for free.

I know it sounds like a commercial, but I'm doing a commercial game and ODE made me once cry, then I found Newton and I'm pretty damn well happy with it.

The only downside is that LCP solvers are faster than Newton one, but for my purpose I agree to sacrifice some speed for a stabiliti and predictibility

There is internal damping in Newton, even if you set it to 0 - this is the cost of stability, but you can always take it into account.

Several people noticed that but only one guy returned back to ODE, the rest could live with that:)

EDIT: I'm using gravity of 15-25 to prevent moon-feeling:)

I'm glad of that too, because it enabled me to do efficient shadowmapping:)

Good news!


In upcoming patch there will be no minumal damping (only 0.0001 to maintain stability)

_Vlad => this means no more moon-like things :)