Physics Abstraction Layer

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The Physics Abstraction Layer (PAL) is an

• Flexibility – It allows developers to switch between different
  physics engines
  to see which engine provides their needs, as well as quickly testing a new engine.
• Portable – Developers are able to use the physics engine which provides the best performance for different platforms, and are able to write platform independent code.
• Security – If a middleware provider is acquired by another company or development is discontinued, developers can switch engines.
• Scalable – The abstraction layer allows developers to run their code on handheld console platforms up to supercomputers.
• Ease of use – Implementation details of the physics engine are abstracted, providing a cleaner interface to the developer.
• Benchmarking – Researchers can directly compare the performance of various dynamic simulations systems.

PAL is designed with a

PAL supports multiple physics engines, including:

• Box2D
• Bullet
• Newton Game Dynamics
• Open Dynamics Engine
• PhysX (formerly NovodeX and incorporating Meqon)
• Tokamak physics engine

PAL supports multiple file formats, including: ^[2]

• COLLADA
• Scythe Physics Editor file format
• XML

The PAL project provides a set of standard benchmarks allowing developers to directly compare the physics engines and select the engine that provides the best solution in terms of computational efficiency and physical accuracy. Care should be taken when deciding on which engine to actually use though, since engines may be tweaked in ways which PAL doesn't support.

• The official PAL site
• Interactive PAL benchmark