OK, so now that this seems to be decided, when will this day be? Still this year?

I don´t know much about how different the PhysX API is to the ODE API but what if it makes sense to do things differently to give the user more flexibility/possibilities/power?

functions are overloadable, overridable etc in A7. I guess this will be the way out.

I don´t think backwards compatibility is important since physics will behave differently anyway with a new physics engine. All the ODE tweaks and workarounds in your code will have to be reworked. :p

Backwards compatibility is very important and esp. for almost finished projects that can't switch to the new toys because of time constraints or other reasons. 3DGS has always been BC for a certain period of time (before removing it) when switching languages (WDL vs. C-script and now C-script vs. Lite-C). It would only make sense to do the same for physics. Your old ODE code will work just like it did before and if you want to upgrade to whatever is chosen then you can and the engine will use the new one.

Being 100% compatible won´t be possible without keeping ODE around (please don´t! :)) even if the current physics functions stay exactly the same. For example because ODE in Gamestudio uses a big matrix solver by default which works differently to the approximate linear solver of PhysX or because PhysX does vehicles differently. People who need ODE for whatever reason should just keep using the older gamestudio versions.

exactly. backward compatibility cannot be the measurement.

and what about defining phys vars inside med and saving them in mdl. Like i have a model with skirt(say a group in med.) and i want to define skirt as cloth so when i put the model in the level, skirt acts as cloth and the character acts as rigid.

[Like in hl2 or vampire:The masquearade bloodlines]

maybe in mdl8 ?

This suggestion of Quadraxas is fantastic. It could be saved in MED or WED. But it would be very easy just to select the type (box, sphere, cylinder) and the mass (e.g. 2 kg) and maybe something about friction (0..100 percent). Then a pre-defined action or even the engine could handle the physics automatically.

Yeah, the same thing i want to ask.

actually i'd like havoc physics, so far it's my favorite and it's very clean physics...