[ODE] Still Spheres Vs Trimesh at Triangle Edges

[Jon Watte (ODE)]

Jaroslav Sinecky wrote:
> Well, I think I recognized that I also get little "jumps" when rolling 
> over edges but it's small enough and hidden by contact "softness" (CFM) 
> not to have really noticeable effect on handling.
> I prefer to disable MERGECONTACTS because it's better for non-standard 
> situations like sphere rolling over ground and at the same time touching 
> a wall.
>   

MERGECONTACTS is overly aggressive.

What I do is merge all contacts that are within epsilon of each other 
(yes, using an O(N-squared) search) -- it's usually not that many 
elements to worry about. When merging the contacts, I average and 
re-normalize the normals, and average the "depth" value. In the case of 
spheres rolling over triangle meshes, the two contacts will be pretty 
much coincident, so this works fairly well.

Cheers,

          / h+