[ODE] Re: dTerrainAndCone contribution ready for prime time?

[Matthew D. Hancher]

Quoth: "John Miles" <jmiles at pop.net>
> Would it be appropriate at this point to move Benoit's dTerraindAndCone
> contribution into the main library?  Several other users have indicated that
> they're happy with it, and many people have emphasized the need to support
> height maps as a first-class primitive.  I think Ian Overgard (below) and
> myself had the only real problems with dTerrainAndCone, and I'm pretty
> satisfied now.

The thing that bugs me about dTerrain right now is the need for separate 
Y-up an Z-up versions.  This also relates to the confusion over cylinder 
orientation.  I have been meaning to propose the following: I think ODE 
ought to have an option (compile-time, run-time, whatever) that specifies 
whether objects with fundamental axes will be y-aligned or z-aligned.
The terrain, cylinder, and capsule geoms would all behave accordingly, as 
would any future objects that needed to arbitrarily select a preferred 
axis.  (Are there any others already that I'm forgetting?)

What do people think?  I'm not usually a big fan of options of this sort, 
but this seems like a sufficiently religious debate that the best thing 
to do is side-step it by passing the decision on to the user.

At first I was attracted by the compile-time option, but adding those 
results in exponential growth in the number of pre-compiled libraries 
that it makes sense to maintain.  This would be easy and efficient to 
implement with a few thunks at run-time, at the expense of a minor 
increase in code size.  In fact, the collider look-up-table would 
make this absolutely trivial for Geoms....

mdh

Matt Hancher
NASA Ames Research Center
Official: mdh at email.arc.nasa.gov
Personal: mdh at media.mit.edu