I've been playing around with Unity lately, and I was amazed at how easy it is to apply physics. Simply add a rigid body and you can drop a ball that bounces on a plane. Add a physics material and you can make it bounce. Easy.
Now try that in Blender. Add a rigid body to a ball make it active. Add a rigid body to a plane make it passive. Push play. The ball hits the plane. Move the ball up. Now it's falling and stopping in mid air before it hits the plane. Delete the ball and add another one, now it floats up into the air. What is this? A cache problem? There's no cache to clear.
Try and stop the simulation halfway through. Oh now it's crashed!
This has been my constant experience with the physics engine in Blender. I thought the latest version would fix some of these problems but all it has done is make it even more unstable. It is error ridden, unpredictable, unknowable and ridiculously complex. They physics settings make no sense in the real world. Not being able to get an object to bounce unless you change the friction settings on both objects. Which you have to guess because there is no real world friction tables for materials.
It hates planes. It hates complex meshes. It hates me.
Aside from Unity, is there any software or add-on that will give me usable physics in Blender?