[Bf-committers] restore Game Engine project

[Gregor Mückl]

Am Freitag, 15. August 2003 11:35 schrieb Kester Maddock:
> Hi Ton,
>
> I've just been looking at the physics (ODE) side of things.
>
> Currently, I have to say bring back solid! ODE is mostly a physics library
> while solid is a collision detection library - ODE doesn't care about
> collision detection; if you can find out where a collision occurs ODE can
> work out how the physics should react.  Solid also has cones - good for
> culling/radar sensor.
>

Seems like you're relying on outdated information. At least recent CVS 
versions of ODE have OPCODE, a dedicated collision detection library, fully 
integrated. I cannot recall now wether the latest releast 0.39 also includes 
this. OPCODE comes with the ODE source code and therefore is no extra 
dependency.

Still, ODE seperates the - supplied - collision detection from physics 
simulation. As ODE user you still must iterate over all collsion pairs ODE 
detects and generate propert contact joints for them so that the physics 
simulation can handle them.

OPCODE is a dedicated collision detection library which can handle any type of 
"polygon soups". ODE exports the OPCODE functionality through the triangle 
mesh collider. This means that you must give ODE a copy of all meshes for 
which collision detection is enabled. And I don't know wether ODE copies this 
data internally while feeding it into OPCODE. So you end up with at least 2 
copies of blender's mesh data in memory - a fact that I do not like at all 
(but that's personal taste rather than a real performance issue, I think).

Regards,
Gregor