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

[Aras Pranckevicius]

> 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.

Isn't this the "terrain" geom?

> 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.

Isn't this rejected really quickly first in space (eg. hashspace), then by 
AABB check?
 
> And speaking of walls, ODE's collision system doesn't seem very well
> suited to indoor environments.  I'm sure you could make it work by
> cobbling together boxes, or perhaps by making a tri-mesh out of the

In our just-finished commercial (very small) game we didn't use "physics" at 
all. But we used OPCODE (hence TriMesh) for level geometry - that worked 
well. Of course, if our levels were, say, BSPs from the start, then it would 
make sense to use BSP. But ours were just polygon soups from 3dsMax, and 
OPCODE was perfect there.


Aras Pranckevicius aka NeARAZ
http://www.gim.ktu.lt/nesnausk/nearaz/