[ODE] ODE as a complete FPS solution..

[Tim Johnson]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Martin C. Martin" <mcm@ai.mit.edu>

> This seems like the wrong way to go.  In an FPS, you generally want the
> player's collision geometry to be a cylinder, so that they can always turn
> in place.  You don't want realistic physics for the player, because that
> would be too hard to control.

This is the kind of thing I'm unsure of. I was hoping we could selectively
apply physics to the player (for example, no rotations, must slide around,
can be made immovable). Our current physics system for the player, while not
that complex, has a lot of very awkward problems that I'd really like to
avoid tackling again. Where might ODE cause practical problems? Despite my
reluctance to rewrite player physics, I don't want to force a square peg
into a round hole.

> If you can help it, you don't want to
> collide against the triangles used to render the environment, but against
> some lower-poly approximation to it.

We do this whenever possible. But we're still dealing with huge triangle
soup trees from 3dsmax.

Tim