[ODE] Object hierarchies

[Jean-Sebastien Guay]

Hello Jon,

> Do you know if those separate meshes attach using articulated joints
> (universal, hinge, ball-and-socket, slider, ...), or are statically
> attached to the root?

In my current situation, I don't have any joints anywhere. I know it's a pretty
limited case, but the project just involves submarines moving underwater. The
submarines can shoot torpedoes at each other. Everything else is static.

> What most game engines do is have the artists place collision proxies in
> the mesh as separate mesh pieces. Just like you'll have separate LODs,
> you'd have a separate "LOD" for physics, consisting of boxes, spheres
> and capsules. Then they could also mark up whether things should
> articulate (and if so, with what kind of joint), or just attach to the root.

Indeed, that's what I have heard and seen in a few other projects.
Unfortunately, for this project we had just 3 months to make a small game with
a 6 people team (who are mostly at undergrad-level and who all have other
classes too). Of those six, two are modelers. We had a lot of graphical content
to make, so it was decided early on that we would just make one version of every
model at relatively low polygon count. That model would serve as collision mesh
and as graphical representation at all times, no LOD at all. If we had had
maybe a couple weeks more, we could have made separate collision meshes for all
objects and maybe one or two more levels of detail for the bigger meshes. But as
it is, we have two weeks left and we need to make do with what we have...

Anyways, thanks a lot for your answers. I'll let you know how it ends up.

J-S
--
______________________________________________________
Jean-Sebastien Guay     jean-sebastien.guay at polymtl.ca
                         http://whitestar02.webhop.org