model cloth as spheres connected by ball joints?

[wellsb]

Hello!
For a simulation (in Blender) I need a curtain which can be dragged aside by both wind or rigid bodies. The rigid bodies again are moved interactively inside the game engine.

Since Blender's soft body simulation only works for animations, but not in the game engine, I'm looking for another solution.

1) I could model the cloth as several spheres connected by ball joints (constraining the distance between neighbours). Is this possible in realtime for about 30x30 spheres, or is it highly inefficient?

2) Is it possible to use the algorithm of Blender's softbody animation from a python script? I mean, if the timestep is large enough, this should be possible in realtime. Or would the integration become unstable?
Would it be possible to use other libraries like ODE (they emphasize the stability of their integration for any time step) or OpenTissue?

Thanks
B.W.