[ODE] code quality again

[Jon Watte (ODE)]

There are two problems facing ODE, or any fundamentally hard open source 
project:

1) Solid physics simulation is actually a hard problem that requires 
significant rigor. Such rigor is actually not commonly found among open 
source developers or hobbyists.

2) Everyone working with ODE want to "make a game" or "finish their 
thesis" -- they don't want to "make ODE better." Thus, there's a real 
shortage of people's time to actually improve it substantially in the 
ways that you suggest.

Yourself, you have the same attitude: it's not what I want, and I'm not 
going to spend the time making it so.

You will find that the other free or free-ish systems (Bullet, Gimpact, 
Newton, etc) have their own problems, with performance, stability, 
flexibility, or a combination thereof. The only system I'd use rather 
than ODE (if source didn't matter) is PhysX, which is free (on PC) and 
high quality, because people have gotten paid, daily, to address those 
hard issues.

Open Source is a great model when several somewhat inexperienced 
developers with free time on their hands can get a kick out of 
contributing. It starts falling down as soon as the problem becomes such 
that the people who can best work on it, are already busy working long 
hours on things they get paid for.

Cheers,

          / h+


Gero Müller wrote:
> I think it is a pitty because of this i actually consider using another
> library. Which is not worth mentioning as my project is too small, but
> it MAY reflect other possibile users/contributers opinion as well. So
> PLEASE increase code quality before patches are merged.
>