Without modelling various muscle groups and so forth, this is going to be largely an exercise in gross approximation. I would just find an equation that appears to look nice and stick with it. (e.g. speed of blade = a.(strength - k.(weight))    )

The main problem I see with this is that there are many muscle groups in each motion, all of which act on the forces in the blade in different ways to each other. (as a martial artist I can tell you that this also includes abdominal and leg muscles)
Thus shoulder muscles would be using most of their force to counteract the gravitational force, while the back muscles will be almost exclusively pulling the sword sideways. (assuming a man in normal stance, if he is on an angle or something, stuff changes)

I think the idea here should be KISS. Spend your time on things the user will actually notice...

As an example of what I mean...

Basic speed calculation...

Basic Speed  BS = a.strength - b.weight
Upward Swing = BS - c.weight
Downward Swing = BS + d.weight
Thrust = BS
Sideways = BS

a,b,c etc = costants. may be replaced with more complex formula to get exponential curves etc if need be.

This project sounds great. I will definitely be giving it a look.

I tried a while ago to use odeforjava and found that it only compiled for linux. (this may have changed of course) I did my best with the make files, but I certainly no expert in that area. I am sure a make expert would have been able to make it go.

The timers in windows based systems are not accurate and other background processes will cause inaccuracies.

My experience of this is in profiling my Prolog program. (using SCI Prolog FYI)The docs say that you will never get super accurate results because windows does NOT count actual CPU cycles devoted to a process. So the timings a estimates at best. (Making sure all your background processes are switched off will help)
Linux, of course, will return very accurate results.
This explains why Jeff is getting good results, you wont/can't on your windows systems.

This is very frustrating in my case because I will be using profiling to estimate execution times on a 600 machine cluster that has a mixture of XP and Linux boxes. Bugger.  

BTW anyone tried building the project on a windows system? I managed to build the ODE C code fine after having to edit source code to make it work with VS.net, but the javaforode stuff is not compiling.

I can get the .java files to compile into the bin directory, but the "make jni" stuff is failing - obviously since it was written for linux/unix.

Anyone have any ideas?

PS: Make is suppose to make compiling easier?? My god what a horrendous mess of a a setup. Its almost as if the designers WANTED it to be a mess...

Actually they just finished unintegrating it from Java3D so that it is framework independant.  

Since the future of 3D in Java is unsure, probably the best way to go....