[ODE] Lots of stacked boxes/breaking constraints (was Re: Inside ODE)

[Adam Moravanszky]

> The problem with the boxes in ODE is that the collision routine only
> returns a single contact point between boxes.  This means that face-face
> or edge-face contacts aren't treated nicely.
>

Being maybe the first one who complained about this and then didn't do
anything about it, I offer my OBB collision detection library to anyone who
wants to try to integrate it into torque.  The library will find all of the
possible 8 contacts between two boxes, complete with normals and everything
else that ODE needs.  It has been tested and is robust.

Unfortunately it requires that the boxes don't intersect by more than a
small delta, which ODE, unlike my sim, does not guarantee.  This is
neccesary because otherwise "contact" becomes meaningless and you instead
have a common volume.  I'm not sure how one could extract sensible contact
points from that.


--
-- Adam Moravanszky
http://n.ethz.ch/student/adammo/