[sldev] [ATTN-LL] Physics engine status update?

[Dirk Moerenhout]

I never tested how SL (or rather the old Havok I guess) does it but I
can't imagine it's, currently, the fastest way to do it. Nor as you
noticed yourself is it really usable.

If you build up the sphere with too few triangles you may end up
getting something that is (or maybe rather was) mathematically faster
as you can simplify the triangle math more easily. Still with todays
FPU power it'd be better to just calculate how a real sphere would
roll over that plane.

This is what Nick Gray from Havok says about it in the PDF that was in
this thread earlier on:
"But we need one more piece of info to help us guide our choices for
efficiency, and it's that convex objects are easier to perform
collisions with than non-convex objects.
So triangles, spheres, capsules, cylinders, boxes, cones or convex
polyhedra are 'simple'. Arbitrary meshes (triangle soups), or even
just triangle representations of the above
convex shapes are 'complex'. And the rule-of-thumb is that collisions
between complex geometries are very costly to do in real-time."

Dirk aka Blakar Ogre