[ODE] Building terrain from .flt files

[Peter Oost]

On 15:05 Mon 21 Nov     , Thompson, Randy AMRDEC/SAIC wrote:
> I have some experience building visual simulations of ground vehicles
> using Vega-Prime and Vortex.  I am exploring the possibility of
> switching to using OSG with ODE instead.  I am just beginning to look
> into all of the issues but one thing that I am concerned about is the
> terrain.  I need to be able to use terrains generated in Open Flight
> format (.flt).  I assume I will need to have a way to create a trimesh
> using the Open Flight terrain.  Has anyone done this before?  Will I
> need to write a .flt reader to extract the vertex info that I need?  Is
> there a plug-in already written for this somewhere?

You can have a look at Delta3D (www.delta3d.org) they use OSG and ODE and ODE.
Their latest release (last friday) includes a few very nice terrain features. Even if you don't want to use Delta3D you can see how they extract the trimesh data for ODE from the relevant OSG nodes (at this point is doesn't matter what was the original data source, .flt or .3ds etc.). I succesfully used their method in my own OSG/ODE project a while back.

-Peter