Bullets don't work under BulletSim!

[Kayaker Magic]

I have been running my world Panthalassa under the BulletSim physics engine since around August. Walking around was fine, I didn't notice any problems. But I read a bug report on the OpenSim Mantis page about bullets not generating collisions under bulletSim! So I went to my archery range and sure enough, my arrows have been bouncing off the targets without generating collision events! So even though I hate BulletSim less than I hate ODE, I have switched back to ODE.

If you came by my world in the last 3 months and tried the archery range or hunting Yerik, you should come back and give it another try now! The arrows are making the THWACK sound when they hit the targets again!

[Kayaker Magic]

Back in October I switched my world Panthalassa back from BulletSim to ODE because I found out BulletSim doesn't work with bullets!
Those of you who know me, know that I like finding ways to get things working without using the physics engine.
So I researched using llCastRay to avoid using physics for weapons.
llCastRay and related things also have a lot of bugs in OpenSim, but it works reasonably well. (Better than BulletSim with bullets).
So I converted my arrows and archery range to work with llCastRay, added rifles, pistols, snowballs, and rayguns.
They all work exactly the same under ODE, BulletSim, PhysX or Havok because they don't use the physics engine at all.
(Well, actually InWorldz has fixed all the bugs in llGetRot and llCastRay, so they work much better there).

So the time has come to turn BulletSim back on at Panthalassa! Nothing that I have in my world cares what physics engine is running. And I think BulletSim works better for avatars than ODE does. If you were afraid of trying the experimental BulletSim, come to my world http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world/Kay ... anthalassa and see how it feels. Your avatar doesn't sink up to its hips in quicksand at random times. You don't ever bounce on your feet and slide downhill. For avatars, this makes BulletSim better than ODE.

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi Kayaker,

BulletSim consumes a lot more server resources than ODE, we HIGHLY recommend not using it until they solve that problem. The increased CPU usage will result in faster performance degradation as avatar concurreny increases. It also contributes to more lag in worlds such as your own that use a lot of scripts that already slow down the sim frame rate.

[Kayaker Magic]

OK, I'm back on ODE. Bullet does avatar physics better but since none of my builds cares what engine is there I'll use ODE.

By the way, as we (Ilan and I) were IMing about this last night, every time I sent a message I got the "User not online, message saved" message.
Then Ilan would reply, so he really was online. It was annoying but I ignored the error, at my peril.
Eventually the message changed to "Message deleted, too many messages saved" message, and I was unable to finish the conversation!

Ilan, what is going on? Why do I get that message when you ARE online?

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi Kayaker,

I wasn't inworld (online), I was responding via the Send Message option on our website to the offline IM notifications that were being sent to my email account.

Eventually the 25 pending offline IM limit was reached so the system wouldn't let you send me additional IMs.