[ODE] Loading trimesh from file

[Jon Watte (ODE)]

Rodrigo Hernandez wrote:
> That said, it is probably NOT a good idea to do this for large 
> "buildings", or for meshes that have too much detail, if say inside your 
> building

I've found the performance to be just fine. The OPCODE code will 
internally build an AABB tree of the collision data, so it will quickly 
cull out all the triangles that are not close to the player. It would 
only test pieces of that plant if the player was actually very close to 
the plant.

That being said, almost any game will typically build a less complex 
collision mesh for its geometry, than the rendered mesh. Sometimes, if 
you build a mesh in multiple LODs, you can use a lower-LOD mesh for your 
collisions. That's just plain good sense, and is typically done to save 
runtime RAM (rather than, necessarily, performance).

Cheers,

          / h+