[ODE] XODE - should angles be in degrees or radians?

[Jon Watte]

> But, not being able to store things like right angles precisely, 
> would seem like a bit of a showstopper for a geom/phys file format. 

I believe this argument is a fallacy. The reason is that ODE, internally, 
uses radians, so even if you can "store" a 90 degree angle precisely, as 
soon as you "load" that into ODE, it's no longer exact.

I think that replicating exactly what's inside the scene is more important. 
I think basics for a file format should include being able to stop a scene, 
take a checkpoint, play out the scene, then restore the checkpoint and play 
out the scene again, and get no divergence.

The only way this is going to happen is if you don't introduce arbitrary 
conversion between internal formats and the stored format. You can print a 
floating-point number in a format that will exactly replicate after load 
for all values. However, you can't make a conversion to degrees, and then 
back to radians, exactly replicate after load for all values.

Thus, it seems to me that the "right angle" argument is moot (because you 
lose that right angle as soon as you actually load the file) while the 
"perfect persistency" argument seems to have some weight.

Cheers,

			/ h+