The name ncolide was better

[EdorianDark]

Maybe this could be a huge breaking change to ncollide?

[sebcrozet]

Hi! So right now I’m not sure yet about what this crate will end up being. As you suggested, there are two options:

• Make this a breaking change for ncollide.
• Make this a new crate that would be the successor of ncollide. The current name cdl (i.e. Collision Detection Library) is by no means definitive.

Right now I am working on a separate crate because it is just easier for me to work that way.
The main reason why I am thinking of making a new crate instead of just a new version of ncollide is that, as you said, this is a huge breaking change (including the removal of some features like the CollisionWorld and generics wrt. the scalar type).

So this is all open to discussion if you happen to have some specific ideas on why this should just be a breaking change for ncollide or not.

No matter the choice being made, these changes (or new crate) will be released at the end of January 2021. So we have till then to decide.

[EdorianDark]

I think it is important for a project to have a pronounceable and recognizable name.
And in my subjective opinion I think that ncollide is better than cdl.

[jbowtie]

I agree that cdl is a terrible name, largely because it used as a three-letter acronym in many, many fields and that will be terrible for people attempting to locate the right library.

I see no reason not to continue using ncollide with a major version bump. Alternatively, maybe consider a fencing term since this is meant to work with Rapier -- something like touche (the fencing term for a contact) seems both an appropriate metaphor and easier to remember.

[sebcrozet]

@jbowtie Thank you for your input! I am certain now that this will be a new crate instead of a major version bump of ncollide. The main reason is that making a major version bump of ncollide would imply that nphysics would become completely unmaintained (because nphysics uses generics so it would not be able to upgrade to that new version of ncollide. And if it cannot upgrade to the latest ncollide it won't be able to upgrade to the latest nalgebra to avoid incompatibility with the older version of ncollide). And because there are some features nphysics has that rapier does not have yet (like deformable bodies, multibodies, and the ability to use fixed-point numbers), I am not ready to completely drop maintainance nphysics just yet.

Though I agree the three-letters name cdl isn't very good. The name touche is an interesting suggestion but I am affraid people could be confused with touch (which already has many uses in CS, like touch events, touch the command-line, etc.) Right now I settled with parry, which is a word that appears frequently in games and also seems appropriate.

[sebcrozet]

The crates have been released with the names parry2d, parry3d, parry2d-f64 and parry3d-f64!