Benefit of using NxOgre over just using PhysX directly

Hello

It is unclear for me exactly what do I gain if I use NxOgre instead of using the PhysX API directly.

Can anyone please shed some light, what are the main benefits?

Thanks.

Same with another Physics wrapper with Ogre, or any wrapper really. You'd have to write wrapping code eventually. To me it seems to be a waste of development time when there is something already there for you. There's also lots of nice bits here and there, that extend PhysX or offer new features.

There are a lot of people using it, and they claim it's very easy to use and powerful, so I must be doing something right. Which I'm sure some of them will pop in here, and give their moneys worth

i don't know who this betajaen character is but i'll tell you this: NxOgre is definitely the best way to start using OGRE with the Ageia PhysX library. Consider it this way; everything you have to do to get the two working together is in the NxOgre code, so you can easily learn the PhysX calls directly. At the same time, once you understand how to directly use PhysX with OGRE, you'll realize how nice it is to already have a wrapper that takes care of all the basics!

With or without the wrapper, using PhysX in your own engine is still fairly tricky.

NxOgre is on at least its third generation, its mature most features work. It will save you development time.

It means you dont have to set up things like connecting PhysX actors to Ogre scenenodes and entities, and also gives you all the updating methods (i.e. simulate(t)) so you dont have to go through all your objects and update them youself.

Also it lets you do all of the PhysX calls using Ogre::Vector3 which saves you a lot of pain

Oh it also makes cooking meshes into collision shapes a lot easier... and much more. Basically it stops you reinventing the wheel for every application you write

Okay, you have convinced me to have a better look at NxOgre.

One potential obstacle is that the http://nxogre.org/FAQ says:
What platforms does it support, Does it run on Linux?

At the moment NxOgre only works on Windows. As of PhysX 2.6.0 Ageia have released a Linux version, but no work porting NxOgre have been done yet.
I do development work on Linux. I have AGEIA PhysX 2.7.2 for Linux & for Windows. I plan to have my applications distributed for both Linux and Windows. I am not willing to give up working on Linux or distributing applications for it. Is the NxOgre FAQ how up-to-date regarding this matter?

I read the whole The NxOgre for Linux Thread but it doesn't give me a good answer if it is possible to actually get NxOgre to work on Linux. Some people reported of success but then again, people reported about lot of errors.

Maybe I have to wait for an officially supported Linux NxOgre release? A long wait? I am not in a hurry with the physics side but it wouldn't hurt to have an official release of NxOgre for Linux already so I could evaluate it.

The FAQ is out of date. Infact the entire NxOgre website is out of date, and deserved to be shot.

PhysX on Linux does work, sort of. It's very iffy, but it's first release. It'll get more stable in the future. Since PhysX on Windows and Linux interface the same now, there shouldn't be any reason why the same NxOgre code will work across the platforms.

Well there is one; me. I haven't gotten around to updating the Code Blocks project to reflect the thousands of new files I've added to NxOgre since I worked with Linux. But since most Linux users can compile a distribution with a screwdriver and a floppy disc, it should be a problem.

Although you've already been convinced to use nxOgre, I thought it might be worth mentioning a good site that has tutorials for Physx and DirectX that would make a good comparison to using nxOgre or deciding to write your own. Of course I'm pushing linux to the side a little bit here

http://www.equalmeans.net/~chriss/EQM/index.html

The tutorials are good and clean, but the time and effort it would take to wrap it up isn't worth it if someone else has been kind enough to do it for you. Everyone is a bit worried when it comes to using middleware in a project but I think its safe to say that pretty much all of the games industry now uses middleware(s) in their projects.

I don't think anyone uses DirectX directly anymore. It just makes no sense in creating some sort of engine/adapter/wrapper around it, when there are plenty and very good ones around.

Pretty much one of the best avantages of those wrappers is you get things like NxOgre that come with it.

But your tutorials will apply to NxOgre pretty well, granted the code is different but the theory is right there.