by amuzen » 18 Jul 2013, 09:13
There are certainly some features that could be useful, but unfortunately the library seems to be far from easy to use.
The main issue is that getting LoS built would become really difficult. The library certainly counts as an obscure dependency since not even its developers package it: you can only it from SVN. The library also has a huge list of dependencies, and the dependency list and the build instructions are hidden inside the huge PDF manual, so most users would likely miss them.
I only took a brief look at the architecture and the source code, but I can see signs of it being difficult to integrate the library. In practice, it's apparently intended to be used either through the stand-alone viewers or the Python API, neither of which are an option for us. Even though there's a C++ API, it's mostly undocumented and doesn't come with a pkg-config file, so it'd be difficult to use it in practice.
The current animation system we have mainly just lacks animations that respond to collisions or positions of other objects. Those would only require a decent IK solver, so I'd rather take a small library that only does IK and does it well. Of course, just stealing the IK solver from SmartBody might be an option, but it doesn't look like it'd be particularly easy to separate.