[sldev] Havok4: Offer LOD degrade priority to landowners and groups first

[Callum Lerwick]

On Sat, 2007-09-29 at 15:57 -0500, Dale Mahalko wrote:
> The new Havok-4 engine has the ability to degrade physics calculations
> down to a cube per prim when the simulator is lagging.

While this might sound great in passing, in practice I can't see how
this could possibly ever *not* break things.

Think about it. By definition, the cube is never going to match up with
normal prim dimensions. Unless it was already a cube. :) Either the cube
is going to have to hang outside the normal object boundaries, vice
versa or both. So when the LOD changes, objects near each other are
practically guaranteed to interpenetrate. And interpenetration is
exactly the thing that physics engines spend all their time trying to
avoid! Uh oh, you're in trouble now! What do you do? Well, you either
have to disable physics on those objects completely, or resolve the
interpenetration. This would generally means that when the LOD changes,
you will see objects suddenly fly apart for no apparent reason.

Unless I'm missing something this is a major misfeature.
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