[ODE] Car simulation

[Jon Watte (ODE)]

The API for building a triangle soup collision mesh in ODE does the 
special building at runtime. You just point it at your list of vertices 
and your list of triangle indices, and it does the rest. The loading 
will take a while for large soups, though.

ODE does not have a "preprocess" step for triangle meshes, unlike 
commercial APIs like Novodex or Havok.

Also beware that trimesh<->trimesh collisions aren't very robust; you 
should plan on modeling your cars using basic geomtries (spheres, boxes, 
etc) rather than triangle meshes, for stable results with ODE.

Cheers,

			/ h+

Joakim Simonsson wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> We wish to use ODE in our car driving simulator. I understand that  
> collisions between vehicles should be easy to implement. But when it comes  
> to terrain collisions, I'm wondering if we can load our  
> 3d-graphical-database, and make the vehicles collide with that.
> 
> If that is not possible, I understand that the alternative is to build  
> special collision databases that corresponds with the  
> 3d-graphical-databases.
> 
> Does there exists a program or a plugin to build a such collision database?