[ODE] Hovercraft?

[Chris Brodie]

Hello Guys,

In a few days I'll be to adding vehicle support to my engine now that I
have ODE up and bouncing stuff around (http://fourth.flipcode.com).
Initially I'll just cut \ past a buggy from a sample but my goal is to
add hovercraft to it. I posted Russ about a year ago when and he said
that soft contacts needed to be added to ODE before this would really
work. Is dContactSoftERP & dContactSoftCFM what I'm looking for? 

NOTE : Since this is a sci-fi game hovercraft is just the way to think
about it. The affect I'm trying to achieve is along the lines of the
hover vehicles in Star wars, they attempt float X distance from the
ground.

I was going to add this support by just using a Box(hull) with 4 Hinge2
and 4 spheres(hover field). The spheres would be large and mostly
overlapping. I was going to give a fair amount of travel to the hinges
Axis1(how?) and make them quite squishy so that running it across a
rough TriMesh would smooth the flight path out a lot(not sure about how
to do this either).

Is that the best way to go or is there a better way?

Many thanks

Chris