LocoTest: Deploying and evaluating physics-based locomotion on multiple simulation platforms

Abstract

In the pursuit of pushing active character control into games, we have deployed a generalized physics-based locomotion control scheme to multiple simulation platforms, including ODE, PhysX, Bullet, and Vortex. We first overview the main characteristics of these physics engines. Then we illustrate the major steps of integrating active character controllers with physics SDKs, together with necessary implementation details. We also evaluate and compare the performance of the locomotion control on different simulation platforms. Note that our work only represents an initial attempt at doing such evaluation, and additional refinement of the methodology and results can still be expected. We release our code online to encourage more follow-up works, as well as more interactions between the research community and the game development community. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.