[Closed] Reactor – missing collisions or broken constraints

Hey guys!

I’m working on a reactor simulation where several hundret animated helpers drag rigid body objects along, using a linear dashpot. Each animated helper drags one rigid body.
Now I’m running into loads of collision problems, depending on which solver I use.

With Havok 1 all the constraints work fine – all rigid bodies get dragged propery – however, when a rigid body gets caught up at a corner of the world collision proxy, at some point it’ll just fly through the wall to catch up with the constraint.

With Havok 3 this doesn’t happen – but it doesn’t handle initial interpentration very well – it’s extremely arbitrary as to how far objects must be apart to not interpenetrate – I actually simulated the pieces into a state where no interpenetrations occured and baked this state to use as the inital state for further sims – yet when I sim from that, it reports interpenetrations again.
The big problem is that interprenetrating objects no longer follow their constraint – they just float in space (I have 0.0 gravity to sim stuff floating in water) and bounce off the world proxies.

So either way I don’t get away without loads of manual work – either resolving alleged interpenetrations (havok 3) or tweaking the trajectories of the animated helpers to avoid their rigid bodies flying through walls.

There has to be a more robust way of solving many rigid bodies. (our game engine handles interpenetrations better!!!)
Do I need to invest in a commercial physics solver or can I tweak reactor, to prevent missed collisions and resolve interpenetrations?

Please help!