[ODE] visibility detemination?

[skjold@cistron.nl]

Yes, you are right of course. Just now I posted something to indicate I did not intend to imply that actually using dCollide for this is a good idea. But like you said, things like those AABB's and spaces can be used rather effectively for culling quickly, especially since they're just there even if you don't take advantage of them. It just takes a little thought to do that in a way that makes it worthwhile over regular FOV calculations (or as a preliminary step to quickly narrow down the selection before further processing).

In short, I was aiming my comments mostly at the use of the dSpaceCollide callback, NOT at actually using dCollide.

Greets,
Mark

> 
> I very much doubt that you want to use collision at all for visiblity
> testing - it's bound to be much slower than a frustrum vs (ideally
> hierarchical) primitive test.
> 
> If you think about it, ODE is already using axis aligned boxes to minimize
> collision checks.  You can just test these precomputed boxes against your
> view frustum.  If you use spaces, you can cull entire spaces with a single
> check.  Doing collision on top of that is overkill ...
> --
> gl