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MathEngine's Dynamics Toolkit 2.0 and Collision Toolkit 1.0 Features: The MathEngine system is composed of two pieces intended to work together. The Dynamics Toolkit simulates rigid bodies, constraints, and contacts. A number of constraints and contact friction types are included, and access to the dynamic simulator is provided at a number of levels. The Collision Toolkit handles collision detection between objects, but it is very basic. It only supports a small set of collision primitives (sphere, box, plane, and cylinder) and their unions. The API is modular (more on this below), so adding a custom collision detector is possible, but it would be a lot of work - work you were hoping to save by licensing a physics engine. Documentation: MathEngine's documentation is the best of the three packages. The manual is very thorough with both a user's guide and complete reference to all the classes in the architecture. There is even a glossy foldout that shows frequently used information. The code is well organized and documented. There is a small amount of inconsistency in the documentation; for example, it uses the terms alive/awake and dead/asleep interchangeably. The friction parameters are nonintuitive and nonphysical. Some guidelines and a bit more documentation on setting them would have helped. The tolerance values used by the simulator are documented, and some effort is made to describe them. Additionally, there is a section on optimizing and constructing good simulations. While easy to read and understand, the demonstration programs were too basic. Ease of use: The system is a class hierarchy in structure, but the access to the library is through fairly lightweight standard C functions and data structures. The API is clean and relatively well designed. The dynamics and the collision toolkits are completely modularized and loosely coupled, so a developer could easily use either the toolkit by itself, or call the well-documented contact-resolver function directly. This layered approach is the right way to design a physics engine API for licensing, in our opinion. However, MathEngine has not provided a complete interface between the systems, so you have to do extra work to get them to cooperate. The system has no matrix helper functions. Simulation memory allocation is error-prone.
Production: Similar to the Ipion library, the MathEngine system is designed mainly for coders. Any tools needed for importing models or allowing artists to preview the system will need to be created. The Collision Toolkit can use Renderware models, but no other formats. There appears to be no way to write internal preprocessed data to the disk. The engine supports the PC and Playstation 2 platforms. MathEngine does not generally license complete source code, but said they would discuss it on a case-by-case basis. Integration: The layered approach to the API makes integration very easy, probably much easier than the other two engines. If your program already handles collision detection, you can easily use only the dynamics system or vice versa. MathEngine provides most of the source code to the abstraction layer that communicates with the dynamics and constraint solver. Input and feedback: There are simple APIs for exerting torques and forces on bodies, but the programmer must apply joint forces and torques manually. Some of the toolkits and subsystems have callback functions for feedback, while others have "get" functions; most of the rest have enough sample code included that direct access of the data structures is possible. Cost: MathEngine has two pricing plans, either a single fee of $50,000 per project, or $5,000 plus royalty of 50 cents per unit. Technical support: The MathEngine web site has a developers' forum for discussing the toolkits. Support over both e-mail and telephone is very good, although we did not test this support anonymously ________________________________________________________ |
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Features
