4.14 Collision Detection and Physics

This section presents everything about collision detection and physics.

The first sub-section presents the collision system of Crystal Space, that allows to test for collisions between meshes and entities, as well as to control the motion of collision actors that will move around the scene depending on the collisions with the objects in it.

The physical simulation goes a step further than simple collision tests, by allowing to animate the objects depending on the simulation of the forces that are applied on them.

There are initially two plugins for the physical simulation, based respectively on the Bullet and the ODE libraries. The ODE library is one of the first open source library for physical simulation, and has been a reference for a long time, being used in many games and simulation environments. But these last years it has been overtaken by Bullet which is now far more widely used and has more features such as soft bodies, terrains and kinematic objects.

This is not advised anymore to use the ODE plugin, in most cases, the Bullet plugin will be more interesting.

There is now a new version of the collision and physical systems, that merges both functionalities into a single framework. Altough this plugin is still not fully tested and stabilized, this becomes now the advised solution to be used.

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