[ODE] Sliding over a trimesh

[Jon Watte]

> Confused ramblings.....
> Also. I was thinking about the trimesh collision code, and I was 
> wondering if it might be a good idea to be able to give trimeshes a 
> handedness (cw/ccw). This way the penetration depth is always known. 
> Might this make it more stable?

Trimeshes already have an implicit handedness (which varies depending 
on whether you think of coordinates in right-handed or left-handed 
space).

Regarding your "getting caught" problem: if you actually have 
penetration, an edge versus the leading side of a box is always 
going to catch you. This is the penalty of doing business in a 
penalty based world (that allows penetration).

Perhaps you really want to be sliding a CCylinder? You can give 
it a well-defined angle around its major axis by applying the 
appropriate torques to keep "up" as "up".

Another approach is to make sure that edge contacts only affect 
other objects in the direction of the face normal of the edge 
(which gets into questions of WHICH edge you hit) or in the 
average of the face normals of the two triangles sharing the edge. 
Don't know if this is what ODE does already or not.

Cheers,

			/ h+