[ODE] ODE joint internals

[Jon Watte]

> An interesting suggestion; I suppose it is true that for a complex 
> simulation the cost of blowing the whole thing away and rebuilding 
> it should be small compared to the cost of collision and stepping. 

How often do you actually change the configuration?

It's not a whole lot of work to re-construct something, for sure, but even if it were, would that be a real problem? If it's something that happens every frame, I could see it, but I can't quite see what the use would be of doing it every frame ;-)

> orientation that they are in at the current time.  So I have to load
> up all the bodies into their initial positions, build the joints, and
> then relocate the bodies to their current positions.  (Am I missing
> something?  Is this really what you have to go through right now to
> reload ODE state completely, setting all the positions and

I suppose you could directly create the bodies and geoms in the position/orientation they had when you tore it down, if you wanted (or create in identity and re-locate). I don't see how you'd need to re-create it twice -- feed your saved data into the "rebuild" function and you should get the position/orientation calls down to one per.

Again, if this is a seldom-case, I wouldn't sweat it. But at this point, I'm quite curious as to WHY you need to do this!

Cheers,

				/ h+