Raydium 3D Game Engine

I open this thread cause I have received some critics about the usage of the ODE functions for creating and managing "things" with ODE.

By one side they don't like the name system. It's not well checked, the raydium_ode_name_auto function is a bit simple and also they ask for an internat list of ode names, to avoid repeat them.
For example a unique big list or varios list grouped by kind of "thing" (one for objects, one for elements...). If a name is reused, then it should return a fail.

Also they appoint for a new way for using ODE functions, but I think is better if they explain it by themselves (i'm just making an introduction).

This auto naming fuction fix only problem with overwriting datas with same name, but from dev. point of view, developer need create clean data structure and not have a lot of unique object and element names.

actual function status:




=> all ODE names must have UNIQUE names

from my point of view this is more usefuly




=> this is good for object oriented scene data

... this is good for object oriented scene, something that Raydium does not aim at all

I can easily understand that it's quiet disturbing to have to generate a separate name for elements of another instance of an object, but Raydium does not follow any "object paradigm rule". An element is a unique thing, with a unique name, owned by a uniquely named object. This object itself is not a big variable containing other things, like it's used to in usual object oriented development, it's "only" a bounding box for some elements of the scene.

In other words, I like to be able to do this like ...
id=raydium_ode_element_find("ball");
... and not ...
id=raydium_ode_element_find("football_game.ball");

But (there's a "but"), this way to go allows you to create your entity names absolutely like you want, even in an object oriented manner if you want ...
Just to show you, using your previous example :



You can even create a very simple wrapper for raydium_ode_motor_create() that adds object name to element name by itself.

See ? RayODE names are just some sort of "absolute path" to an entity, in a namespace (object, element, joint, motor, ...) ... Nothing else