[ODE] How to get around the float accuracy problems in a streaming physical world?

[Megan Fox]

To the best of my knowledge, when you're streaming in a world, you
will always need to sew throughout your world "seams" which represent
loop-over points in the coordinate systems.  So long as your system
already has some concept of portals, this is quite doable for most of
the systems - AI, rendering, etc - but I'm coming up against a tricky
bit of code in how one should approach this with the collision and
physics side of things?

Is my best (only) alternative to build some concept of portals into or
on top of ODE, which would detect plane collisions at the sector
boundaries and temporarily duplicate and transform the object to the
other side of the portal for dealing with collisions there as well as
on the near side of the portal?  You'd end up with a different
collision space per sector, where objects touching the sector boundary
are duplicated across, and any forces applied to any one instance of a
boundary object are transformed back through each boundary and applied
to all instances properly.

Or is there a more graceful approach to the problem?


(as it stands, my intentions are to simply ignore true streaming -
that despite having a terrain system and general loading system that
could cope perfectly well, the time to implement the rest just isn't
worth it, so I just treat my sector boundaries like load zones and end
up with a Morrowind-esque "almost seamless" world.  This should work
fine, really, but I was hoping for a better alternative.)


Thanks,
-Megan Fox