Novodex Physics SDK - What Would You Pay?

[Donavon Keithley]

I've engaged the folks at Novodex about the possibility of offering special licensing terms for indie developers. And the key question of course is what would be an appropriate price point.

So I ask you, if you're in the market for a physics engine or can conceive of yourself as a potential customer, what kind of price would you need to see to be interested?

For the sake of argument, let's say this would be like the Garage Games licenses: per-programmer, no royalties, no limit on the number of games you can make with the license, and only applies if you generate less than $250k per year in revenue.

(If you haven't already seen the Novodex Rocket demo, check it out. It's excellent.)

[ggambett]

It depends :

- Does it come with source code and examples?
- Is it portable (Windows/Linux/Mac)?

[Matthew]

It depends :

- Does it come with source code and examples?
- Is it portable (Windows/Linux/Mac)?

I'm more of a scripter than a programmer, and I don't really know the answers to your questions. The NovodeX SDK is available free for non-commercial use, though, so can check it out here:

http://www.novodex.com/downloads.html

At a glance, it looks like they only provide support for Win32. No idea how hard it would be to make it more portable yourself.

[Edit: I guess I do have some useful information.] Taken from the PDF manual:

2.4 Linux and Console Libraries
The SDK is available for the Linux operating system and console game platforms for qualifying licensees. Please contact NovodeX for details.

[stan]

As far as I'm concerned, I'd rather use ODE which is free, comes with source code and is portable. However, I don't know the respective limitations of ODE and Novodex... nor in which project I'd use them .

[Nutter]

I had a meeting with them at Meltdown and was quite impressed with what their implementation is capable of, as it is very fast and robust and has some very cool features. Not being a physics programmer, I can't really compare it with Havok or even ODE, but I was impressed by what I saw.

For most indies, unless they do come out with a indie-specific license, I think it's safe to say that ODE will do for now. If they do decide to provide indies with full-featured licenses at a decent discount however, I recommend those who need a physics library take a good look at it - assuming it is around the general indie-license price of things like Torque or fmod, it'd be quite the bargin.

*edit: Sorry but most of the information was removed as I can't find any of it on their web site, and I don't want to accidentally violate my NDA.

[ggambett]

For most indies, unless they do come out with a indie-specific license, I think it's safe to say that ODE will do for now.

Well, I am using ODE in my current project, and it does meet my criteria - BUT it's also somewhat difficult to use. To really be able to use it, you must know a great deal about physics. Check the ODE mailing list - there are either newbie question or extremely high level questions, but no intermediate questions (or users). For me, trying to make a car behave like a car is resulting extremely time-consuming and frustrating, and I'm not quite there yet.

So... if Novodex offers a sensible license price ($100 - $200), it's multi-platform, comes with source (because that's the easiest way of not having to contact their tech support), and comes with good examples, I'd switch.

[Sybixsus]

I've used Newton, ODE and Tokamak, and they're all pretty decent, but there's certainly room for improvement in each case. However with good free options available, Novodex would have to be something really special to persuade me to part with more than $100. If it was just a little better and didn't have any of the weak points of the free engines ( poor friction in Tokamak and Newton, for example ) then I'd probably pay $100.

[Vectrex]

theres similar discussions on the Ogre forums, download this guys demos he did with ogre. I was well impressed (turn off shadows if it runs slow)

http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=5923

[Donavon Keithley]

Thanks for the feedback guys.