ODE seemed promising when I looked at it several years ago. Bullet is also quite popular. Searching for a comparison of the two led me to An Evaluation of Ope

ODE seemed promising when I looked at it several years ago. Bullet is also quite popular. Searching for a comparison of the two led me to An Evaluation of Open Source Physics Engines for Use in Virtual Reality Assembly Simulations: http://elib.dlr.de/79462/1/74320346.pdf http://elib.dlr.de/79462/1/74320346.pdf The authors, who were already using Bullet, concluded that "Newton and PhysX would be valuable candidates to compete with Bullet for integration in our current simulation environment."