[ODE] Rules for ODE trimeshes

[Flavien Brebion]

This might not be very helpful, but i implemented collision detection
tri-meshes
via ODE in a 3D CAD viewer application without any problem.

My scenes are more or less the "worst" case regarding collision detection:
lots
of very simple objects, lots of very complex objects, most geometry is not
manifold (can contain holes, or simple planes).. and it works very well.

I currently only use capsule / tri-mesh collisions. I had to patch some code
in
ODE to do the collision tests on both the positive and negative sides of a
triangle, but it was no big deal.

To give you an idea, my biggest scene so far contains 800 million triangles,
and
in order to not generate GBs of data at run-time, i implemented some
streaming
methods (via mesh saving/loading to disk) for ODE. The file on disk is
around
3 GB.

I also ported ODE and Opcode to 64 bits, and here again i haven't met any
big
problem. Opcode was a bit delicate since it does a lot of ugly tricks in the
tree
structures (it assumes pointers are 32 bits - which is obviously wrong in a
64 bits
environment), but i successfully made all the modifications in an hour, and
it worked
at the first try.

F. Brebion

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