I'm looking for a decent 3rd party library for collisions and physics. It looks like the 2 major options are JBullet and ode4j. I was wondering if anyone had experience with these libraries / suggestions. JBullet looks like it hasn't release since 2010 but ode4j is still in active development.
ODE (the engine ode4j ports) isn't exactly updated either. Last release is from 2012, but according to changelog it provides just few bugfixes and the release before was from 2009. More importantly ODE is awful engine, I was very glad to leave it in 2007 when I discovered Bullet. With (J)Bullet you can use either high-level API, or when in need you can use any of the implementation classes yourself.
When doing real projects using real-time physics engine it's very often about doing many tricks, and access to implementation classes is very helpful. Also it contains continuous collision detection (EDIT: it seems ode4j got it too), not much well integrated with regular physics world, but you can invoke it manually for various needs. In my game I've used it for FPS player movement to provide sliding over walls and for detection of geometry so I can limit certain positions of player.
Also one thing to remember that even when physics engines provide collision detection it's not suitable for some tasks, like raytracing. It's way more efficient to write your own code for that, eg. using KD tree.
Yes JBullet could probably get some minor update, but the thing is that it works as is.
Also I'm wondering if anyone has actually released a game with a JBullet as a part of it. I can't much on the googles.
I've created JBullet to power my game:
Resistance Force, but it will take some time to "release" that
Don't know of any "bigger" game (look at JME3 based games, some of them probably use JBullet), though people use it also for various non-gaming stuff.
