Bullet and Wii

[Oogst]

I am wondering how suitable Bullet is for use on the Nintendo Wii. For the game I am working on, I do not need loads of special features, but I do need very stable physics for basic sphere, box and triangle objects. That seems to make Bullet a perfect fit, especially in combination with its price.

However, I am wondering how suitable it is for use on the Nintendo Wii. Will everything simply compile for the Wii as it is? And how about performance? Is Bullet efficient enough for the Wii and will extra optimisations be needed/be adviseable? Does anyone have experience with using Bullet on the Wii?

(Devkits have not arrived here yet, which is why I cannot try things out right now.)

[AlexSilverman]

Hi,

I've actually just completed a project on the Wii using Bullet and am starting another and simply put, Bullet is a great choice. The license allows for use on consoles, as opposed to ODE or any other GPL licensed package. It will not just compile out of the box, so to speak, but the changes that are necessary are fairly straightforward. I'd be happy to help out with any Wii specific questions (or any questions really) you have. The integration of the Bullet internal allocator makes it easy to use your own memory scheme, and in general the code is very well laid out and easy to expand if need be.

As far as the simulation quality goes, it is great as well. We had very unoptimized rendering in our game, and we were still able to have some decent simulations, with large triangle meshes, multiple dynamic objects, and other additional collision detection calls each frame. On top of that, the support you get from the forums is fantastic. I cannot overstate their usefulness, or how great this community is.

Bullet is a great choice for a physics engine, and perfectly suitable for use on the Wii.

- Alex

[Oogst]

That sounds like either you are very happy with Bullet on your project, or have been paid to speak so positively... I will asume it is the first.

Are you allowed to say anything more detailed on a public forum? I do not have a devkit yet, so could you give me some examples of the kinds of things that need to be changed to get it to work? Also, I have heard that the Wii has slow RAM and fast RAM, will Bullet run okay in slow RAM, or can things be kept small enough to put the entire physics things in fast RAM? Or is there some way to move things around quickly?

By the way, just wondering: are you allowed to say which game you worked on?

[AlexSilverman]

Hi,

That sounds like either you are very happy with Bullet on your project, or have been paid to speak so positively... I will asume it is the first.

Definitely the first

Are you allowed to say anything more detailed on a public forum?

I'm not sure at all about what NOA would consider a breach, despite the amount of publicly available information, so let's play it safe and handle this offline. I'll send you a PM on this.

As for the project, I just posted about it on the Games/Demos forum. http://www.bulletphysics.com/Bullet/php ... =17&t=2065

- Alex

[chunky]

The license allows for use on consoles, as opposed to ODE or any other GPL licensed package

Actually, the ODE license is dual LGPL/BSD, so it is console compatible since you can choose to use it under the BSD license.
But some people dislike the advertising clause for their own stuff anyways ["Must include this copyright notice in documentation..."], http://ode.org/ode-license.html

Gary (-;

[AlexSilverman]

Ah. I stand corrected, and happily so. The more options the better, I say Thanks Gary.

- Alex