[ODE] Roller-coaster

[catienci at sfu.ca]

Hello,

I am presently trying to decide whether ODE is suitable for my purposes; I
have a feeling it may be overkill for what I am trying to do. I have been
reading the manual, but don't completely understand how some things are
accomplished and am hoping that some of you experienced folks may be able to
make a recommendation or two.
I am trying to model the motion of a sled sliding down an ice track, which
is a very similar problem to modeling a roller coaster. My main question is:

- How does ODE handle interaction between an object like a sled, and the
enormous track object. Is it collision based? Does the track need to be a
polygon mesh? If so, isn't this approach a bit crude in that the sled will,
so to speak, be colliding against a bunch of triangles instead of sliding
accurately along a predefined surface?

I need my simulation to be quite accurate, and it seems to me that modeling
the smooth motion of a vehicle on a 3D track based on many many collisions
is less than desirable.
Am I understanding correctly that this is how ODE would proceed? Do I have
any alternatives other than mesh/collision based motion?

Thank you for your time and help,

Cristofer