[ODE] Question about ODE and particle systems.

[Jon Watte (ODE)]

Jeremy Roberts wrote:
>      1) Is this even feasible for a large number of particles, i.e. 
> say 500 to 1000 or more particles?
>      2) Is there a more elegant solution?

Yes, it is feasible, somewhat depending on target CPU and target frame rate.
You can use a ray, or you can use a sphere; not sure which will be 
faster (try both).
You might want to send the collision detection task (and particle system 
update) to a background thread to take advantage of multi-core machines, 
so plan for that up-front. Note that ODE isn't thread safe, so if some 
ODE stuff goes on in a thread, you probably should offload all ODE stuff 
to the thread.

Cheers,

          / h+