[ODE] Making floating player bodies properly "ride" moving physical bodies?

[Megan Fox]

If you cause your player body to hover, it lets you get up and down stairs
reasonably (amongst other things), but how do you properly calculate the
friction between the simulated feet and the body below?

I'm sure I can work up a bit of code to properly apply jumping/landing
forces (land on a pile of boxes and the pile topples - that sort of thing),
but I'm not sure how to go about simulating horizontal friction and forces?


(this would also include uncertainty on how to handle dContactMotion1 /
conveyer belt-style motion, except that this is a fantasy world, so none of
that in my case thankfully)


For the moment, my player body actually drags along the ground, and some of
the physical response I get is really quite neat (when the entity comes to a
stop on top of a physical object, the counter-force applied actually makes
the object wobble - just as if you were balancing on a chair, etc - very
cool).  I'd love to retain some of this if I can.

-Megan Fox / "Shalinor"
Lead Developer, Elium Project (http://www.elium.tk)