AnimatLab Contributers

Dr. David Cofer
The primary developer for the AnimatLab application.

Dr. Donald Edwards
Dr. Gennady Cymbalyuk
Dr. Ying Zhu

Software Contributions

AnimatLab uses the following open-source toolkits and souce code. Special thanks to all the people who contributed to these projects. Here is a list of the open source toolkits that AnimatLab uses.

Open Source Toolkits
   Tool  Description Reference AnimatLab Version
1.   boost 1.54  This is a basic utility library that is pretty much the de-facto standard for C++ now. http://www.boost.org/   V2
2. OpenSceneGraph 3.0.1 OSG is used for the visualizations within AnimatLab. http://www.openscenegraph.org/  V1 & V2
3.   Bullet Bullet is the new open-source physics engine that drives the dynamics. http://bulletphysics.org/wordpress/ V2
4. osgBullet This is a wrapper around Bullet to make it easier to use with OSG. http://osgbullet.vesuite.org/ V2
5. osgWorks This is a utility library used by osgBullet. http://osgworks.vesuite.org/ V2
6.  Python AnimatLab allows embedded python controls within the simulation. https://www.python.org/
V2
7. SWIG SWIG is used to generate the python and C# interface wrappers for C++. http://www.swig.org/
V2
8. Premake Premake is used to generate Windows and Linux project files. https://premake.github.io/
V2
9. STLPort This was used in version 1 to overcome some early issues with using the STL library in Visual Studio. Boris Fomitchev @ http://sourceforge.net/projects/stlport/  V1

AnimatLab also used the commercial Vortex physics engine from CM Labs in version 1 and 2. Use of the Vortex physics engine is still available in version 2, but we no longer have a license to do new development with the Vortex engine. So all new development going forward will use the open sour Bullet physics engine.

Animatlab also used a low-level utility library called StdUtils. It was used for other projects in addition to AnimatLab, but they were never publicly released. StdUtils consolidated some source code utilities to make them easier to use. Here is a list of the third-party source code that was included as part of the StdUtils utility library and used by AnimatLab.

Source code Used byAnimatLab
  Source Project Description  Author Name Author Website/Email AnimatLab Version 
1.  Markup Release 6.3 This is a really great XML parsing library. AnimatLab uses this for all configuration file processing.    www.firstobject.com V1 & V2
2. TryEnterCriticalSection This is a handy mutex locking code that is used to store chart data. Olan Patrick Barnes  patrick@mfcfree.com V1 & V2
3. MersenneTwister This is a great library for better random numbers than using the standard rand method. Takuji Nishimura and Makoto Matsumoto   V1 & V2
4.   openFrameworks I used a few of the classes from this framework and modified them to allow AnimatLab to communicate with Arduino's running the Firmata protocol. These classes were actually in the openFrameworksArduino library and not in StdUtils.    http://openframeworks.cc  V2


Here is a list of source code that was included in the StdUtils llibrary, but was never used by the AnimatLab project.

Source code not used by AnimatLab
  Source Project Description   Author Name Author Website/Email AnimatLab Version 
1.  IDSQLDirect This is a very good library for accessing databases.  Ian Duff isduff@bigpond.com V1 & V2 before official release.
2. ZlibEngine This is a cool little class for compressing text in memory.
markn@tiny.com V1