Actually you are right. I forgot about when there is a lot of people in an Age.. That is the one time the 50 collisions owuld stand a problem and probably crash the engine.

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if the collisions would be calculated independently for each avatar in a loop the you would not reach 50.

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Well because ODE is open source that can actaully be changed to do that.
There just needs to be someone who knows enough about programing and physics engines to do that..

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zehl wrote:

Actually you are right. I forgot about when there is a lot of people in an Age.. That is the one time the 50 collisions would stand a problem and probably crash the engine.

The limit is 50 simultaneous collisions which, AIUI, means things like a pile of 50 rocks where every rock affects every other rock and you have to calculate all of the forces together, or a Newton's cradle with 50 balls, etc.

That shouldn't be an issue for MOULa. You wouldn't treat avatars as normal physics objects which get pushed around by other objects. Apart from gameplay issues, it just doesn't work correctly. If someone gets shoved, they typically don't just topple over and roll down the hill; they'll compensate in ways that have more to do with neurology than physics.

When simulating the behaviour of a cone or similar, you would treat avatars as "terrain", i.e. a collision between a cone and an avatar will affect the cone but not the avatar. When moving an avatar, you would treat other avatars as terrain; if you bump into one, it prevents or deflects your motion, but won't cause the other avatar to move.

It would mean that you have to limit the number of "kickable" objects (cones etc) within an area so that the engine doesn't freak out when someone decides to pile up every kickable object on top of a sleeping avatar.

MOUL (and Uru since the beginning) has treated avatar-avatar intersections as non-collisions. That means the collision complexity is O(n), where n is the number of avatars. And since each client handles their own avatar, it's really more like O(1).

Tahgtahv wrote:

MOUL (and Uru since the beginning) has treated avatar-avatar intersections as non-collisions. That means the collision complexity is O(n), where n is the number of avatars. And since each client handles their own avatar, it's really more like O(1).

Even if we implemented avatar-avatar collisions, and/or implemented collisions server-side, you would only need to collide against objects in the immediate vicinity. You don't need a physics engine to know that you're not going to collide against something fifty metres away. But I wouldn't use a full-blown physics engine for avatar-avatar collisions anyhow, just simple deflection.

I believe that was purposely not done to prevent bullying. You wouldn't want someone to be stuck in a corner due to another avatar. It would cause all sorts of problems with people in the link-in spot, and general movement in certain areas of the game as well.

Tahgtahv wrote:

I believe that was purposely not done to prevent bullying. You wouldn't want someone to be stuck in a corner due to another avatar. It would cause all sorts of problems with people in the link-in spot, and general movement in certain areas of the game as well.

I can see the reasons why you might want to avoid avatar-avatar collisions. The downside is that it means that the only limit to the number of avatars which can occupy even a small area is the limit on the total number of avatars in an instance, which creates scalability issues (or rather, it rules out various mechanisms for improving scalability).

An upside (of no collision) is that it makes possible the fun game of Sardines.

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