[ODE] Colliider space/geom issues

[John Miles]

I think you could probably merge the two terrain classes into one without
much trouble, but since I didn't wirte them in the first place, I can't
speak for them.  Perhaps Benoit Chapperot is still on the list and could
offer some insight into why he chose to write two separate modules?

It's up to you guys what to do with the cone class.  I've never needed it,
and I don't know if anyone else has used it.  I believe the cone and
heightmap classes are completely independent of each other.

-- john

> Ok, I glanced at the code, but what immediately strikes me are the
> distrinct classes for TerrainY and TerrainZ.
>
> This looks like unnecessary codebloat to me.
>
> Surely, the proper way to implement this would be to have a single
> Terrain class, with a parameter 'height axis' that can be set to x,y or z?
>
> Selecing the axis runtime instead of compile time may hurt performance
> a little bit, but I wouldnt sacrifice maintainability of the code
> for this.
> And if it's really important to have the last bit of performance, compile
> time parameterization could be done with templates also, so we dont bloat
> the code.
>
> So what do you want me to do now?
>
> (1) Merge the code as is.
> (2) Rewrite the Terrain classes to a single class, or two instances of
>      a single template?
> (3) Just dump this stuff in contrib/ as is.
>
> Also, the contrib is presented as a unified terrain+cone.
> Do these parts hold their merit on their own? Thus: if you
> merge only one of these with the code base, would that make sense?
> Or put differently: when --with-cone and --with-terrain are available,
> would some users configure ODE with only one flag?
>
> Thx!
>
>    Bram
>