[ODE] Crashing within dWorldStep

[Boris Searles]

Hello,

I'm using ODE to physically simulate the evolution of 3d static 
morphologies (trying to maximize passive height). Everything works fine 
most of the time, but whenever a large object is built (using capped 
cylinders) in only two dimensions, hence has a flat side, and falls on this 
flat side, the whole program crashes. The crash happens when the object 
comes into contact with the ground plane (they sometimes fall from some 
height) within the dWorldStep method. The objects I use are compound 
objects (many geoms with one body, similar to technique shown by Mark in 
previous mail), so no joints involved. My guess is that it has something to 
do with the collision detection, possibly that a very large number of 
contact points are generated at one time? I limited the number of contact 
points to 5 (nearCallback method is copied from one of the examples). Has 
anybody encountered similar problems or any ideas how I could fix this?

Since I'm doing many evolutionary runs, it is quite annoying when 
everything crashes in the middle of a run and I must start over. Or is 
there any way to throw an exception from within the dWorldStep method so 
that the whole program doesn't crash? I think having some sort of 
exceptions could also be quite useful for other applications.

Thanks for any help,
Boris