Future of ODE.js

[ashconnell]

@Ricku34 would you be interested in updating this library?

If so, what are your thoughts on the following:

• Updating to the latest version of ODE (0.16)
• Having this work in both a NodeJS and Browser environment (may already be possible?)
• Publishing to NPM

Also, were there any issues that blocked you from continuing with this port? And are there any known issues with the library in it's current form?

I look forward to hearing back from you.

[Ricku34]

Sorry for this late reply
I published on npm yesterday the last current version of the ODE.js library :
npm install odejs
and yes it also works on nodejs!

I ported version 0.7 because the later versions are more difficult to compile through emscripten, they offer the choice of a new GIMPACT collision library, which I do not know.

To my knowledge, the only known problem is the collision of height field space which does not work properly. I'm not sure why.

in the next few weeks, I plan to recompile the library into WebAssembly, the performance gains seem promising.

[anderssoft]

The height field geometry need more contacts to work, "kind of ok" with some geometries, up to 16 in -> ODE.Geom.collide, this also accounts for complex meshes.

Also using world.quickStep with around 20 iterations world.set QuickStepNumIterations( 20 ) i think is faster, probably not as stable but...

Can you give my any hints how to compile this with emscripten (on windows) totally new on emscripten, i have been using ODE for years in our game engine, maybe i can help out to bring some of the newer code in to this project...

[Ricku34]

Thanks @anderssoft but I'm not sure that increasing the contacts is a good thing for the simulation's stability.

and i've got a runtime error : memory access out of bounds when i drop a mesh
maybe this error is new since i compile ODE in WebAssembly ?

i've add a "how to build" topic in readme file.

[anderssoft]

Ok, on the "PC" build at least it makes the height field collision more stable, ok we dont use mesh->heightmap only standard primitives ->heightmap collision.

I got the build up already, but its good with docs on the build process thanks. There was some small issue with the makefile when buildng on windows/or the version i used. its a quoting issue "", swap quoting ('<->"") on this lines as below .

EXTRA_EXPORTED_RUNTIME_METHODS= 'ccall', 'cwrap', 'setValue', 'getValue', 'addFunction', 'removeFunction'
EXTRA_EXPORTED_RUNTIME_METHODS="[$(EXTRA_EXPORTED_RUNTIME_METHODS)]"

Reference for this kind of error
emscripten-core/emscripten#6021