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Newton Physics is now open source!

Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2011 3:24 pm
by Virion

Re: Newton Physics is now open source!

Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2011 8:16 pm
by jacmoe
*shocked* :shock:

Quite a decision. :D
From closed source to ZLib - quite a surprising change.
Overhertz wrote:ehhh why the decision to go open-source?????
Julio Jerez wrote:Is not that what people are being asking for almost eight years now?
:wink:

Re: Newton Physics is now open source!

Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2011 9:41 pm
by reptor
The author probably realised that it's too much work for him to make money worth the effort out of the project...

Re: Newton Physics is now open source!

Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2011 11:30 pm
by JernejL
reptor wrote:The author probably realised that it's too much work for him to make money worth the effort out of the project...

You must have a very narrow vision of other people's works, to judge it so quickly and from such a perspective.. From what i recall, there never was any intention to comercialize Newton.

The author stated on the forums that this way he can focus on coding the physics engine and have others take care for porting the library to different platforms.

Re: Newton Physics is now open source!

Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2011 11:37 pm
by jacmoe
I think that was a very wise decision. :)
I am eager to see how Newton Physics develops.

Re: Newton Physics is now open source!

Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 12:26 am
by Kojack
I just went to the newton forum, and my account has been deleted.
4 years of membership and contributing to a newton based student game which won the 2006 Game Connect Asia Pacific indie game contest (I wrote the newton to ogre wrapper they used).
Oh well. I didn't post much on there.

Newton has been pretty popular on iphone, open sourcing it should help a lot of alternative platforms (I haven't looked into how portable Bullet is to small systems like phones, pandora, etc).

Re: Newton Physics is now open source!

Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 12:41 am
by betajaen
Kojack wrote:I just went to the newton forum, and my account has been deleted.
4 years of membership and contributing to a newton based student game which won the 2006 Game Connect Asia Pacific indie game contest (I wrote the newton to ogre wrapper they used).
My account at Ageia get's deleted all the time. :?

This is good news though, it will make wrapping Newton a little easier, and less binding to Ogre for OgreNewt. You could probably replace the Vector classes in Newton with Ogre ones to save on conversion functions. That aside, it would be good to see it on the consoles, and mobile devices. I also think it would be good for Bullet, as both of them now can learn off each other.

Now, it'd be nice if PhysX became open source. But we all know that's never going to happen. ;)

Re: Newton Physics is now open source!

Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 1:09 am
by JernejL
Kojack wrote:I just went to the newton forum, and my account has been deleted.
4 years of membership and contributing to a newton based student game which won the 2006 Game Connect Asia Pacific indie game contest (I wrote the newton to ogre wrapper they used).
Oh well. I didn't post much on there.

A lot of old inactive accounts there were purged recently due to old spammer accounts posting, this happens on practicall every forum..

Re: Newton Physics is now open source!

Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 1:29 am
by Kojack
Yeah, my nvidia and ageia accounts are always being deleted (something like 1 month inactivity, which is annoying because it's taken up to 3 days to manually approve me again so I can download the latest sdk.
Havok doesn't have an account (for the free pc version at least), but if you don't make a bookmark to the download page then you have to keep registering emails with them.
I haven't even registered on the bullet forum (that I can remember).

I think I only had a couple of posts, so no real loss.

Re: Newton Physics is now open source!

Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 3:57 am
by mkultra333
When I was looking around at engines, I tried to join the Newton forum. For some reason, I was banned. Which was weird, because I'd never been there before and never posted anything. I sent them an email asking them to correct this, and got no response.

So I ended up using Bullet. I like Bullet, it always was open source. Some stuff in it annoys me, like the accuracy of straight line hit scans leaves something to be desired if used against convex hulls, and the experimental multi-threading had issues for me (wouldn't work properly with meshes, had to use convex hulls), but after a bit of tweaking I seem to have it functioning adequately. I really like the automatic interpolation, so I don't have to deal with any aliasing myself. From my limited use of the Bullet forum it was hit and miss, some posts answered straight away, some ignored, and it moves pretty fast. But then that's par for the course with programming forums.

People who used both engines, which do you think is better?

Re: Newton Physics is now open source!

Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 10:47 pm
by reptor
JernejL wrote:
reptor wrote:The author probably realised that it's too much work for him to make money worth the effort out of the project...

You must have a very narrow vision of other people's works, to judge it so quickly and from such a perspective.. From what i recall, there never was any intention to comercialize Newton.

The author stated on the forums that this way he can focus on coding the physics engine and have others take care for porting the library to different platforms.

Of course I have a very narrow vision of other people's works. Thank you 8)

Re: Newton Physics is now open source!

Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2011 12:20 am
by madmarx
People who used both engines, which do you think is better?
I prefer Bullet. Mostly for performances reason. I suppose Newton was using too realistic physics when I did not really need them? noidea, but there are plenty of use for a physic engine, so the constraints (joke inside :mrgreen: ) are different between projects.

Re: Newton Physics is now open source!

Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2011 2:17 am
by Kojack
Yeah, it's hard to point to any one engine as definitely the best, since they are all quite different. They have different collision shapes (Havok has cylinders, PhysX doesn't), different joints (I think Newton had a corkscrew joint which Havok might have too, but nothing else does) and various other issues.
Then there's the api, Newton is based entirely on callbacks (which I don't like), Havok is painfully SSE obsessed (get used to vector math which looks like C rather than C++. Good for performance, but is annoying to use), PhysX needs that stupid driver crap otherwise it's dll won't start, etc.

The most feature filled one is Havok. The animation system alone is enough reason for it (full skeleton animation with physics interaction, skeleton retargetting, inverse kinematics, export tools, etc). Plus if you pay massive amounts of cash you can get Havok Destruction, Havok AI, Havok Behaviour and other bits. (The basic Havok physics and animation components are free for pc).

Re: Newton Physics is now open source!

Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2011 1:33 pm
by syedhs
My ip is banned too in www.newtondynamics.com. I have to use public proxy server to browse thru the website.