Bullet Vs. ODE

[jcarew]

Hi, what engine will be better for FPS/RPG style game with normal physic features eg. similar to STALKER physic features. STALKER use ODE and it works very good (fast and no tunelling). Whats with racing games with high speeds (Bullet vehicles have got problem with high speeds)? ODE is better for this type of games? Which engine will be faster for game like a STALKER (fast and no tunelling, Bullet character control is slow (many convexSweepTests for one character), but without convexSweepTest we see tuneling problem) and arcade racing games? Currently I use Bullet, but without GIMPACT, maybe I have to use it for better result (no tunelling)? Which engine has got better and faster (for low end machines) timeStep system? Similar topic are very old, so what is looking on the latest version of this two libraries?

[Erwin Coumans]

It is best to keep the character controller separate: any character controller you write for ODE should work with Bullet too. Most games use their own character controller, and STALKER seems not to use any of ODE collision detection system, only the quickstep constraint solver.

The Bullet constraint solver is mathematically equal to ODE quickstep, they both use a method based on Projected Gauss Seidel iterative LCP solving, but Bullet has been better optimized using SIMD.

ODE and Bullet are both open source, and anything you can do in ODE, you should be to do in Bullet in an equal way or better. If not, just let us know and we correct this. The character controller provided in Bullet is just provided as a starting point. If the character controller performance it not good enough, or you face tunneling, instead of using GImpact just please provide us with a reproduction case so we can optimized it.
Hope this helps,
Erwin