2005:270 CIV MASTER'S THESIS AgentPhysics Software Design for Pluggable Real Time Physics Middleware Johan Göransson Luleå University of Technology MSc Programmes in Engineering Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Division of Computer Science 2005:270 CIV - ISSN: 1402-1617 - ISRN: LTU-EX--05/270--SE AgentPhysics Software Design for Pluggable Real Time Physics Middleware Johan GÄoransson Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, LuleºaUniversity of Technology,
[email protected] October 27, 2005 Abstract This master's thesis proposes a software design for a real time physics appli- cation programming interface with support for pluggable physics middleware. Pluggable means that the actual implementation of the simulation is indepen- dent and interchangeable, separated from the user interface of the API. This is done by dividing the API in three layers: wrapper, peer, and implementation. An evaluation of Open Dynamics Engine as a viable middleware for simulating rigid body physics is also given based on a number of test applications. The method used in this thesis consists of an iterative software design based on a literature study of rigid body physics, simulation and software design, as well as reviewing related work. The conclusion is that although the goals set for the design were ful¯lled, it is unlikely that AgentPhysics will be used other than as a higher level API on top of ODE, and only ODE. This is due to a number of reasons such as middleware speci¯c tools and code containers are di±cult to support, clash- ing programming paradigms produces an error prone implementation layer and middleware developers are reluctant to port their engines to Java.