[ODE] Collision against large areas of static geometry

[John Miles]

I was able to create a 1,000,000-poly TriMesh terrain in some recent tests,
and it worked fine except for excessive setup time (about 20 seconds on a
3.4 GHz P4).  As long as your total poly count is at least an order of
magnitude less than that, you should be OK with one big TriMesh geom.

In my case, I ended up splitting the world into 1024 separate TriMesh geoms
with either two triangles or 1,024 triangles each, depending on local
flatness.  That works OK, too.

-- jm

> I'm currently working on a car based game and I have converted my old
> collision detection code to use the TriMesh code that is now
> built into ODE.
> My world geometry is organized into tiles of approximately 30mx30m, each
> with its own model.
>
> What I am wondering is what is the best/fastest way to do
> collision against
> these geometries?  Should I be creating a single TriMesh geometry for each
> tile and then adding them to some QuadSpace, or is it best to
> merge all the
> tiles into one large model and create a single TriMesh geometry?  Does
> anyone have any ideas or experience as to which method would be more
> efficient?
>
> Thanks,
> Stone Lance
>
>
>