[ODE] PosR - a better way?

[Tim Rightnour]

On 11-Nov-2004 J. Perkins wrote:
> I agree with this too. In my case, the vast majority of my geoms do
> not have bodies associated with them (static scenery), so the current
> body-geom integration doesn't do much for me anyway.  I'd rather have
> separate transforms and stop using GeomTransform.

I wouldn't mind the geom transforms, if they were more universally usable.

For example:

1) It would be nice to create a set of geoms, like a bunch of boxes
representing a house, or tree, and then reference those with multiple geom
transforms.  IE.  I create one group of geoms, and then point to it multiple
times with a bunch of geom transform objects.  Perhaps you can do this, but I
doubt you can do #2, and to be useful, it really needs #3.

2)  This would be doubly useful for triangle mesh objects.  I could make one
mesh object of a tree, and 5 geom transforms all that pointed at it.  That
would probably save a lot of memory in certain scenes.

3) It would be really nice to be able to scale an object in a geom transform. 
For example, I use a lot of rocks in my game as scenery.  Sometimes they are
boulders, sometimes just rocks.  I use the same set of rocks over and over, and
just scale them as needed.  The same rock that is a boulder, might be scaled
down and thrown by the player at an orc.

4) Barring the above, it would at least be nice to have a copy operation of
some form, that I could use to duplicate a complex body. Unfortunately, such an
operation isn't useful to me unless I could scale the object as well.

---
Tim Rightnour <root at garbled.net>
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