I am looking for a (free) physics engine for a freeware game I'm working on. The game will be based around physics-vehicles (you're given primitives and you build a vehicle). A large part of the gameplay will be influenced by these primitives deforming (under stress and impact - like in Rigs of Rods). PhysX it seems does what I want it to do. It has metal cloth, you can attach things to it, too much strain can cause it to tear. I'm not sure how fast it is with metal cloth. I also read in the SDK the metal cloth and fluids don't mix (so it'll be impossible/inefficient to have water vehicles?) Havok seems perfect, though the free license excludes Havok Cloth and Havok Destruction making it not so perfect. It was also faster than PhysX (without a PPU) which lead to me using it in a past physics-intensive project. I found Tokamak which says it supports destructible rigid objects, I don't know too much about this engine. FastLSM/RealMatter - Both aren't really engines (just demos), but they do demonstrate fast deformable soft bodies that can be ripped apart, though they appear rubbery rather than metallic. I could write my own physics engine, since this is what Rigs of Rods and Crysis did (and both have excellent vehicle simulation). But my specialty isn't physics. It seems like PhysX is suited for what I want to do. I haven't had experience with too many physics engines which I why I would like some advice on what would be best for what I want to do.

The question is whether you do real-time destruction or import pre-destructed objects in your game. None of this is really supported in Ageia. To my knowledge only Havok Destruction can do this. Also note that you need the render information at the breaking surface. All current deformation and softbody libraries, are still in their infancy and far from usable in my opinion. Even and especially Ageia's soft-body and cloth stuff. This is just some Jacobsen like cloth solver you can write in a day on your own. Havok can do thick cloth and LOD which were the two most important features to solve to be used at large scale in games. Most of what you see in games currently (e.g. Call of Duty or Mercenaries II) are custom solutions build on top of some existing physic system. Most - if not all - is pre-fractured and needs plenty of artists.

Where did you see the pricing for Indies. I only found these prices which are ridiculous in my opinion:

http://www.pixeluxshop.ch/mainpix/content/view/30/43/

Quote:Original post by DonDickieD
Where did you see the pricing for Indies. I only found these prices which are ridiculous in my opinion:

I agree, $500 is ridiculously cheap for a middleware product. I'd have expected it to be $50,000 per sku at least....

\edit: though i see you work for Havok, which puts you're previous comments into perspective i guess.

Isn't it 500$ plus royalties. And if you haven't pre-bought enough the price raises?

I actually worked for Havok in the past. My post mirrored my very personal opinion and experience on this subject. I don't favor any solution over the other because of this.