Well, after quite a bit of testing I think I’m going to abandon multi-threading in physics temporarily and simply couple it with the OpenGL thread as all of my tests were somewhat problematic because of some of the ways that jME-Physics works with the scenegraph. This will likely be something I look into further later, but even in the places where I was able to get multi-threading support to work it was quite a bit slower than single-threaded (I think primarily because of all the locking that had to take place).
However, my goal was to write a stress test to verify if jME-Physics would be sufficient to accomplish what I need to do in Galaxies Beyond. Here is a video of my little stress test in action. This is using FRAPS pegged at 30fps, but in actuality most of the time the FPS in the test was pretty high:
http://captiveimagination.com/download/physics_stress.avi
I dynamically add everything while the game is running and I remove all the physics objects from the scene when I’m done. This is all done using StandardGame’s awesome locking mechanism. 
When would you actually have 500 objects colliding? The ONLY time I see that happening is in an asteroid field. Or like an insanely large battle.
i like the little look around at the end to make sure thay had all gone… ( no smoke and mirrors that i can see )
EmperorLiam said:
When would you actually have 500 objects colliding? The ONLY time I see that happening is in an asteroid field. Or like an insanely large battle.
I'm trying to develop a MMORPG game, so I want to be able to handle any situation without the game crashing. :-p
theprism said:
i like the little look around at the end to make sure thay had all gone..... ( no smoke and mirrors that i can see )
I was going for a "Where did they all go?" kind of action. ;)
Well it's at 23 fps with some of the boxes touching each other and disapperating immediatly or falling through the floor.
When all the boxes are gone it goes up to 30 fps.
Then the movie is over.
Falling through the floor? How fast of a machine do you have?
Irrisor, would that be caused by a stepping issue based on performance?
Sorry I was not sure if they fallen through the floor or disapperaring.
It seems strange to me that after all the boxes are gone you still only have 30 fps.
Why would it matter anything how fast my machine is for viewing an AVI file ?
It does seem strange it would be that low…
I'm sure you know this but are you using step() or stepFast() or quickStep() for stepping ?
Or what is setMaxStepInteractions() ?
Also the steps could be too small, I found that a step of 0.0001 in old odejava is about the same as a step
of 0.01 sin JME physics so I had to increase the stepsiz or everything would be moving very slow.