Why all those "physics engines" are so jittery? Are there no ways to solve such a system with perceptually exact accurancy in realtime? Those kinds of approximations are the source of some of the most hilarious bugs in games over last deacade or so. Please don't read this as a critique of this particular project which is pretty good at what it's trying to do. I just wonder why AAA games use pretty much the same math?…
Animation is an illusion of motion caused by a sequence of still images. The way a physics engine works is by computing those still images -- the frames -- for each iteration in a mathematical model (the physics you want.) If you want 60 frames per second for a smooth animation, you have to compute the whole frame less than 1/60th of a second. The more complicated your physics model is, the harder it is to do this. >…
Physics doesn't concern itself, for example, with how to represent polyhedral shapes, or how to compute their intersections. In the world of computer simulation, there are surely more algorithmic developments to be made. Even if the physics hasn't changed (much) for the last 300 years, there are new ways to precondition systems, and solve them, and so on. I think that's what is meant by "better math".
I think you make a good point about the trade-off difference between CAD and games. In addition to requiring that games be simulated in real-time, you also want the simulation to be causal. In a CAD tool, you can take advantage of being able to do "multiple passes" through time to refine your simulation. In a game, once you've computed the quantities pertinent to a frame, you don't get to go back and recompute those quantities and present them.