[ODE] Piled objects

[Nate W]

On Tue, 30 Apr 2002, Richard Lee wrote:

> Frequently when stacked boxes should come to rest they continue to jitter 
> about and act strangely. [...]
> 
> Will this improve in ODE in the future?
> Is there ways to improve it now?

When two boxes touch, only one contact is generated between them, even if
they are touching face-to-face.  This allows them to jitter (or "boil") as
you saw.  Compare to box-plane interestion, in which multiple joints may
be created - things behave nicely.

See dBoxBox(...) in geom.cpp.  There are some comments near the end of the
function that expain a little bit more.  I for one would love to see this
problem solved, but I'm not even sure how to approach it.  

-- 

Nate Waddoups
Redmond WA USA
http://www.natew.com