I have not yet started to read into Esenthel, i have just some question before i decide if i use your (impressive looking!!) sdk =)

I'd like to develop a little multiplayer rpg with serversided physics.
is the inbuilt networking support able to do that for me, or should i go with some third party lib? ..i'd use raknet if it's possible with your physics system

2nd question: what physical character controller does the engine use? that one which comes with the phyx sdk, or did you implement a custom solution?

Hi,

Current implementation doesn't use physics on the server.

I've developed custom character controller based on Capsule Actor.

does the engine have something like a null renderer, if so i could use physics without graphics, and implement my own server with raknet

Yes thats possible.. you just need to add App.flag=APP_NO_FX; in your init function. Only problem you will always have is that there will be directx device created. Esenthel has this on his roadmap to have an option to start the engine without the need for GPU.

sounds good =)

so my goal is to write a server that does physical simulation for me.. to do so i could then load e.g. a scene/world/map whatever it's called in esenthel and do the simulation with it, but does the NO_GFX flag mean that it's not rendered or does it also mean textures, modells (all stuff i don't need when not rendering) aren't even loaded into memory?
would be a huge waste of resources..

The APP_NO_FX flag means: application will perform only basic graphics, render targets won't be created, application will start faster and use less memory.