[ODE] Why is it that most commercial entities roll their own collision system?

[Steve Baker]

Megan Fox wrote:
> There was the racing game awhile ago, Stalker apparently, and so on - all
> apparently using custom collision systems (or other collision systems found
> elsewhere, possibly, not sure).  Is there some problem with ODE's collision
> that makes it non-suitable for commercial games?

You can usually know things about the objects in the game that'll drastically
simplify the cost of collision detection.

For example, in a car racing game, you could store a height map of the track and
do collision detection by a simple 2D array lookup with interpolation.   That's
going to be orders of magnitude faster than a general triangle mesh lookup.

In a flight simulator, you can know that if you are higher than the highest
hilltop in your world, you can skip over all collision testing with the ground.

There are lots of dramatic short-cuts you can do when you know about the nature
of the world you are in.  All ODE knows about is a big pile of shapes with no
particular organisation.

---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
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