[ODE] Heightfield / Collision.

[Alan Gordie]

Hi, in case you guys haven't seen Thatcher Ulrich's heightfield work, you
can find it here...

http://tulrich.com/geekstuff/chunklod.html

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tu-testbed

Here's a blurb from his site...
"Since summertime of 2001, I've been doing some personal research into
hardware-friendly continuous LOD. I think I've got a method that's about as
good as CLOD can be for T&L hardware. It renders CLOD, with geomorphs, using
batched primitives. It's very friendly to texture LOD and paging data off
disk. The downsides include a long preprocessing phase, and some size
overhead for the disk file. Actually another thing that bugs me is that the
data isn't in a convenient form for doing height/collision queries. But
otherwise it really rocks. "

He is able to pre-process 16K x 16K heighfields into decimated chunks.
These chunks are stored in a clever file format and rendered in real-time on
rather modest hardware.  For instance, his demos run ok on a P4-1.4ghz
w/GeForce2mx and are mind-blowingly smooth on GF4/9XXX hardware.

Now, of course you are probably asking yourself "didn't he just say that the
data structures are not in a convenient form for doing collision
detection?"...  so, why would I post this to the mailing list?

Two reasons:

1)  It's a cool demo and who doesn't like a daily dose of eye-candy!  ;)
2)  Pre-processing the heightfield data to create data structures which are
optimized for collision detection should be just as attainable as the
ability to render a 16k x 16k heightfield in real-time on today's hardware.


Am I way off base?

Alan

p.s.  BTW, I've been holding down the fort in #ode on EFNet for a few months
now...not much traffic, but I've got my IRC client setup to get my attention
in case someone drops by.  Consider this an invitation ;)