[ODE] A trimesh-as-view-frustum question

[Shamyl Zakariya]

I have a couple quick questions about OPCODE.

First, if I were to have a large geom, say a cone or a pyramidical 
section described as a trimesh, would OPCODE detect when an object is 
completely inside? Or does OPCODE only detect intersection with the 
surface triangles?

Second, if the first is true, I'd like to know what your collective 
thoughts are on using a trimesh view-frustum for visibility 
determination. As in, if I had a trimesh corresponding to my view 
frustum with my camera's position and orientation moving and orienting 
the trimesh, would it be an effective way to determine which objects in 
my simulation are visible?

As I write this, I seem to recall that there are ( or were ) problems 
with moving trimeshes -- it that still the case?

I'm just curious. My simulation has a fairly rich environment so my 
simulated robots have a lot to interact with. But my laptop is a fairly 
anemic 800mhz powerbook, so while I've put a lot of work into 
optimizing my OpenGL calls, it would speed things up significantly to 
be able to only draw those objects which are visible, and that of 
course would leave more cycles to my AI. But since the AI work is more 
important than the visualization I wouldn't want to spend an inordinate 
amount of time on a *real* visibility determination system. The 
view-frustum as a trimesh geom approach seems like it would be fairly 
easy to implement, providing of course that it would work ;)


shamyl zakariya :: lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,