| Submitted by Billy Zelsnack, posted on 30 April 2003 |

Image Description, by Billy Zelsnack Here is my latest toy. A demo can be found at: www.shapemaniac.com/bziotd.php I love physics. Working on physics has been some of the most rewarding programming I have ever done. I can't emphasis how cool it is to build some sort of contraption out of a bunch of parts and it JustWorks. I remember a couple of years ago when I saw the first Ipion demo. It was just so amazing to me. Now I have built something along those lines myself and it feels really good.
It is definately not commercial quality physics or anything yet, so it is still pretty easy to break things. Currently there are no spatial structures for anything so performance has a ways to go. The pairwise collision is implemented as brute-force triangle-mesh against triangle-mesh. The triangles you see are the triangles being collided. A better plan is to usually use composited primitives for most things, but I wanted to get the tri-mesh/tri-mesh case working well first.
The framerate is limited to 50fps which is the same rate the physics are updated at. If you start dropping more than a few fps below 50, the physics will run slowly and things will appear to be in slow-motion. I have a 800mhz machine with a GeForce4ti and the worst I have seen it was 42 fps.
BTW. I currently am looking for interesting and challenging work (on or off site). The more interesting the work, or the more cool the location, the better.

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