Vehicle physics

General Discussion
1

I intend to make a simple car game and need vehicle physics, so my question is whether to use ODE or the new PhysX implementation?

Are there any documentation and/or example code for this (both for ODE and PhysX)?

2

For vehicles I recommend using ODE, since vehicle support in Panda3D PhysX is very basic. you would have to start at the point of wheel shapes, and implement the rest yourself.

enn0x

3

If you have experience with writing bindings, you might want to try out Bullet. It has vehicle physics included, although I’m not sure how good it is.

With ODE you gonna have to code it all by yourself – ODE doesn’t support that kind of functionality OOTB in any way. You might find some tips on the ODE wiki (in the HowTo section), or on the ODE mailing list, though.

4

A simple car game is included in demomaster. It is using ode.

5

Thanks for the replies.

I tried the car demo in demomaster and have one question on it: why does the car slide around so easily when trying to turn in higher speed?

6

low friction coefficient. just as in real-life :slight_smile: luckily this parameter can be changed.