Physics [split from network thread]

[joevenzon]

I think thelusiv said this already, but just to reiterate, the vamos physics code (which is the car simulation stuff) is very fast and can run many cars at fast rates. I don't have exact numbers, but it should be fast enough for a dozen or so cars. It's currently iterating at 250 fps, which is way faster than we need, and could even be halved to increase performance if necessary. The really SLOW stuff at the moment, which causes multiple cars to be so slow, is the collision detection code. I end up casting a bunch of rays around (more than necessary) and use my own AABB spatial tree collider algorithm. Although my collider code is much faster than a naive implementation without any spatial sorting, it is not as fast as the ray to trimesh collision in ODE. In addition, ODE is more efficient and accurate when colliding a box with a trimesh (which I fake by casting a bunch of rays).

By the way, it looks to me like live for speed uses IK for the suspension geometry. I think reece146's suggestion is probably the best (coding up the suspension physics from his sources) if we want to fancy up the suspension code.