http://home.seekscale.com/blog/bullet-physics-current-state-and-whats-next
The Bullet Physics project started at Sony and was made open source in 2005, so about 10 years ago.
Bullet is under active development and used in games, movie visual effects and robotics.
We decided to publish an article about Bullet Physics, a physics engine written by Erwin Coumans (now working at Google). Bullet Physics SDK is used by NASA, Disney, and several game engines.
Bullet Physics received recently an Academy Award, and Erwin Coumans kindly accepted to give us a quick interview in his overcrowded agenda.
What was your strategy as regards performance for real time?
There are a lot of optimization methods that we tried and used in various projects and hardware platforms. This ranges from reducing the memory use, using better algorithms, using SIMD vector instructions, multi threading and porting the code to GPGPU using CUDA and OpenCL. We described the GPGPU optimizations in a book "MultiThreading for Visual Effects".
The guy is at Google.
Bullet has been around for a long time.
Its used by all the major 3D authoring packages.
Just have a quick look even on the short wiki page:
3D Authoring tools
Blender—A free 3D production suite that uses Bullet physics for animations and its internal game engine, the Blender Game Engine.
Carrara (software) added Bullet Physics in Pro version 8 .[22]
Cheetah3D, a 3D modeling, rendering and animation software for Apple Mac OS X uses the Bullet physics engine to simulate rigid body and soft body dynamics. (As of version 6.0.)
Cinema 4D version 11.5 uses Bullet as part of MoDynamics.[23]
Houdini has native Bullet Physics support in the dynamics context as of version 12. Available as an community supported open source plugin for previous versions.
LightWave 3D CORE.[24] LightWave 11 also uses Bullet Dynamics for its physics.
Modo Recoil Allows users to simulate dynamic rigid body interactions based upon the popular Open Source Bullet Physics Library
MikuMikuDance a freeware 3D animation program, added the use of Bullet Physics Engine in version 5
Poser versions 10 and Pro 2014 introduced a Bullet Physics-based 'Live mode' for simulating rigid and soft body dynamics while editing the scene
Softimage plugin Momentum developed by Helge Mathee and distributed by Exocortex
Golaem Crowd plugin for Maya developed by Golaem[25]
That list includes the major 3D authoring packages in both commercial and amateur use today.
Going from the responses in this thread,I get the impression most appear not to be aware about Bullet,which is well known. Its been used in motion pictures.
Just because he's used the tools for an hour or two doesn't make him an expet.
Neither,does it make the people argueing with him. Its bordering hilarity that such a well known physics API is some sort of AMD conspiracy and really does bode well for the actual knowledge of people if they are trying to twist it somehow.
I would have been quite happy to let you lot just argue among yourself,but its plain distortion to make Bullet some AMD thing. It isn't.
Its Open Source,meaning some of the posters have just negated a whole community of active contributors for the project.
It has active contribution from multiple companies and individuals and looking at the response from a certain person,they really don't understand what it is at all. Its bordering on clutching at straws, it really is.
Its like saying since Android is based on the Linux kernal,that Linux is some Google conspiracy to put down Microsoft... But wait,MS has contributed too,must be some conspiracy to put down Apple. But wait Microsoft has shares in Apple..
Even AMD has made contribution to Linux,is it an AMD conspiracy now??
Serious,the guy works for Google now??
Now Bullet is some Google conspiracy?
If they could show their backgrounds and experience on projects,at least there would be confidence as opposed to "its humbug" lets have a poke with him,although at times he does not help himself,LOL. Plus I don't really tend to always agree with him,but on the flip side it does not make him always wrong all the time either.
People like Rroff ,I have some faith in,since at least from what he said I tend to agree with,since what he says actually seems to be line with what the odd game dev I bumped into said. One or two of you may actually like what they said about Nvidia against AMD from a dev viewpoint. But we will leave that for another internet argument.
I am not going to bother really answering anymore in this thread,since its probably gone on a Ross Noble like tangent and I am not helping either.
Plus its a lovely day and I need to do stuff.