Opensim Developers

The MOSES team has wrapped up their current efforts on the PhysX investigation, 
and have made it available at <https://github.com/M-O-S-E-S/opensim> 
https://github.com/M-O-S-E-S/opensim


Dr Sean Mondesire, who lead this effort along with Dr Glenn Martin, has left 
the organization.  I am summarizing his efforts and the contents of the 
repository here:


We were investigating the use of the newly open-sourced PhysX physics engine 
from Nvidia, and its potential effects on the number of Avatars and the number 
of Physical objects in a Simulator Region.  We selected OpenSimulator to 
perform this investigation.  The investigation took two routes: A local Physx 
module as a peer to the current Bullet physics module, and a remote PhysX 
module where physics calculations could be performed on a separate machine.  In 
order to minimize the work and create a stable baseline for our comparisons, we 
froze the OpenSimulator version we were working with.  This was both to prevent 
our developers from having to constantly rebase during the new development, and 
also to prevent new work from the OpenSimulator community from affecting our 
comparisons.  Our fork is a little after commit 
c4f86309683bc8db0bdeabddcefd78bb72b178b6, where Dr Martin and his team were 
working.  We are effectively at tag 24383.


Dr Mondesire had been publishing his interim results to this mailing list, so I 
will not rehash them here.  Due to licensing problems, which we are still 
working out, we have not included any binaries beyond what the OpenSim 
community already includes.  The libraries from Dr Martin's lab are permissive, 
but the NVidia license is too vague for our comfort as both a Florida State 
institution, as well as an Army Research Contractor.  The updated README.md 
references our redmine page at 
https://redmine.militarymetaverse.org/projects/opensim-physx/wiki which details 
build instructions for building the components as we used them.


While our work was beneficial to us, we hope that it may be beneficial to 
anyone in the community.  We invite anyone interested to have a look and play 
around with the modifications we have made.  Thank you for your help in this 
multi-year project.


Michael Heilmann

Institute of Simulation and Training

University of Central Florida


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