Feature Request: Evaluate Babylon.js HavokPhysics as Replacement for OimoPhysics

[plojo]

Current Situation

FUDGE currently uses OimoPhysics for rigid body simulation. While functional, there is room for improvement in precision, stability and performance.

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Proposal

Inverstigate Babylon.js HavokPhysics as a potential replacement. Havok is a well-known, widely used physics library, and the Babylon.js WebAssembly integration could:

• Potentially improve precision for collision detection and rigid body simulation.
• Potentially increase performance in large or complex scenes.
• Provide additional physics features, such as more shapes, joints, and constraints.
• Enable more accurate, stable, and feature-rich physics simulations.

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Considerations

• Integration effort and API differences between Oimo and HavokPhysics.
• Ensuring compatibility with existing scenes and components.
• Assess documentation and long-term support.

[JirkaDellOro]

We should talk to Marko to see if he is interested to support here

[TheMarkoD]

Hi,

Interesting proposal.

First of all, Havok is neither open source nor free, therefore we can't use it as a built-in replacement for OIMO.
Also Havok is C++ and must therefore be used through bindings/wasm.

When integrating OIMO i had to consider the paradigms of FUDGE, which at the time were to have a solution
which can be studied by the users (open source, typescript/javascript), isn't built with ES6 modules but available
as commonJS. Also the availability of debugging options that can be displayed in the FUDGE canvas with FUDGE internal drawing functions (point, line, triangle).

In basic physics benchmarks there still isn't a better pure commonJS, typescript like lightweight solution than OIMO.
I agree, there is a lot of improvement possible on the physics side of FUDGE, but as a deeply integrated feature rewriting
it internally to allow a drop-in replacement isn't a undertaking that is currently feasible.

At the time the choices boiled down to either cannonJS or OIMO.
OIMO has two options of which i decided to implement the version of the original creator (saharan) OimoPhysics since the rewritten version of lo-th was based on the original actionscript variant but the creator (saharan) had rewritten the engine in HAXE which is similar to typescript.

The only problem with the integration currently is that you have to use a built of OIMO on my OIMO fork, when using "triggers" since i implemented that myself as it was a crucial feature missing in OIMO. A second problem which arose over time is in large scale scenes and huge mass situations since OIMO isn't dealing with those correctly. The workaround for that is to scale everything down.

My counter proposal is the usage of JoltPhysics, which is open source, used in triple A productions and is the standard physics engine for Godot since a few releases.
There is a Javascript-Built, but since it's also WASM based i'd have to look into the usage within FUDGE and i'm not sure about the visual debug capabilities.