RoboForge

My guess would be that the project died due to lack of progress on the physics wrapper I imagine it's rather frustrating not being able to start on the game or what have you due to the lack of a physics engine.

Also, can someone explain why it's impossible to stay logged on to this forum for any length of time? Like, I sometimes have to re-login after I finish typing a post.

It's worth point out that several of the dead projects aren't wrappers, but actually ports. BulletX comes to mind. Ports, in my opinion, are equally tedious on your patience, but more demanding of your time.

This appears to be the definitive list: http://www.xnawiki.com/index.php?title=Physics_Engine

For native C# physics, it's basically BEPU, Matali, and JigLibX; they all appear to be adequate for our needs and have solid development momentum. What's kind of cool about these engines is that they can readily port to the Xbox 360. That's not a high priority, but it is really nifty, if you ask me.

In terms of wrappers, it looks like there are no less than three PhysX wrappers for C#; that might make PhysX a better choice than Havok, since we could hit the groud running.



Hm, never had that problem. In fact, it usually keeps me logged in even after a month-long hiatus.

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I suspect that getting Roboforge working on the XBox, UI wise would be nearly impossible. Roboforge is very much a mouse-centric game. That being said, for speed reasons it is very likely that a native physics engine would be the best choice. Roboforge involves a good deal of physics objects, of decent complexity, with different joints connecting them.

Speed, especially on slow hardware, should likely be a priority. On the speed issue, one should consider not only the end user, but the tournament servers as well. A new Roboforge game will likely involve more complex physics and game logic. As to how it would relate in speed to the existing physics, I don't know. I do suspect it is likely that a home-made physics engine written in Java might not be the most efficient, so it is possible that the physics would end up faster. Still though, a server having to batch tons of simulations on high quality settings would likely take a while. I would personally love to see more frequent tournaments as well.

Either way, I'll look into the C# physics engines and see what I can find. PhysX has the advantage of being able to utilize hardware acceleration. I know this has been speculated for Havok as well, but I don't know if that ever happened. These are all things to consider, though I do like the idea of pre-made wrappers.

Yeah, I agree that Roboforge would suffer on a console. Still, it's a cool thought that we might be able to adapt the game to better suite a console, and thereby reach a much large audience.

Also, it's worth mentioning that after recent driver updates, PhysX will only be hardware-accelerated on Nvidia cards. In fact, merely having an ATI card installed causes PhysX to fall back into its software mode.

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I don't see how you would get RF working on an XBox, or anyone wanting to play it on an XBox. Maybe you could use an XBox to uploading robots to a tournament.

I didn't know about the PhysX XNA wrappers. I'll take a closer look at PhysX after all I went to the trouble of downloading and installing it.

Just an observation but you seem to have picked XNA and are looking for a physic engine as an after thought. I think it should be the other way around. The part the makes RF fun is the physics engines, not the graphics or easy of development, because RF had neither.

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Actually theres no reason to look for an XNA specific physics engine. Physics engines are actually quite detached from graphics engines. Basically when you get something that is XNA specific, it just pushes around positions and such in a format that XNA likes. Its nothing that you couldn't adapt any other engine to do with a few minutes of work.

At this point in time, I find myself favoring PhysX. We would get better performance even without the proper hardware, but more importantly, almost all of the open-source physics libraries are still works-in-progress to varying degrees. I don't mean to discount all of the fully-managed, open-source solutions out-of-hand – one of them might still turn out to be the right fit for the project – but on closer inspection they look less promising than they did at first.

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A mirror of Slow Slosh's home server, as well as some other useful tidbits.

Took a closer look at PhysX, for the most part I would say it could work. One thing I didn't like about it was it could not do collision detection between two polygon meshes. I'm not a 100% sure Havok can do that either.

Havok also comes with a API called "Havok Animation"; that from what I have read about, it can record and play back the physic engine. Something useful for a battle viewer.

The last half of the Havok manual talks about 3D content tools and has a chapter on
*) 3DS Max
*) Maya
*) XSI

At work today I played with mixing C# with VC++, it's not as difficult as I thought it would be. I just need to learn bit of new syntax for VC++ that deals with integration with CLR and unmanaged C++ code. Very odd stuff too me, but at the same time kind of familiar.

I created 3 projects...
1) VC++ .dll it would be the physic engine
2) C# .exe that would be XNA
3) C# .dll a public interface that links the 1 and 2.

I was able to load the interface from 3 into 1 and use it to implement a C++ class to be used by 2. I was also able make a class in C++ that took a function pointer as a argument, and sent it a delegate from C# to be executed from with in a C++ function. I'll play a bit more with tomorrow, but to me that's already very impressive you can do that.

If you are familiar with design patterns I trying to Bridge XNA to a physic engine. Just toying with the idea right now.

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OK I did some more playing with C++ and C#. In Professional Visual Studio You can have a solution with mixed languages, I have not found how to do that in express yet. It's not essential part of getting RF2, it would just make it easier to develop. But even in professional you still have to sometime compile C++ separate from C#.
Visual Studio Express

The next thing I need to do it try and compile some PhysX examples.

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Homer: "God, why do you mock me?"
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Homer: "Mmmm...Sacrelicious!"
My home Server

OK I got the PhysX example to compile and run. Oddly they where in VS 2005 not 2008, but only got warnings about deprecated functions.

Next I need to compile some XNA examples. Then try and understand how to link them.

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Homer: "Mmmm...Sacrelicious!"
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OK I downloaded XNA and compiled and ran an example with it.
Guess I should try and understand XNA first then PhysX/Havok.

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Marge: "That's not God, that's a waffle that Bart threw on the ceiling."
Homer: "Mmmm...Sacrelicious!"
My home Server

Maybe this would help http://forums.xna.com/forums/t/7574.aspx

Other pages...

PhysX.Net (PhysX)
http://physxdotnet.codeplex.com/

BulletX (PhysX)
http://www.codeplex.com/xnadevru/

Ngd4Xna (Newton Game Dynamics)
http://www.codeplex.com/ngd4xna

Havok
Found just old wrappers...

(I could post just 2 URL's per post )

and... any news about anything? I keep working on my computer science examn (working on a system) cant help too much, rather search things, help with that I know in C# (XNA) and "c'mon guys!!! " words for encourage

Well I need to learn XNA, I got some book on it but have not had time to read them. It's Tax time at work, very busy; brain tired. When I come home I just like to do mindless stuff. Mmm, brainless...

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Homer: "God, why do you mock me?"
Marge: "That's not God, that's a waffle that Bart threw on the ceiling."
Homer: "Mmmm...Sacrelicious!"
My home Server