In my project, precision is the most important thing, than the speed.

So when a forklift is bounded with a sphere, there is some empty space around it.

So that say a worker cannot pass thru it.

I am trying to use OBBs instead, but it is not trivial to implement in OGRE.

And also I am puzzled with how OBBs can behave the same way as a bounding disc or sphere

In Clearpath and Opensteer, they seem not to have something called heterogeneous agents

which I think really making my life difficult. Can anyone suggest what to do in order to

minimize the impact of extra clearance around the bounding volume?

Thanks

Jack

It's quite atypical to only have the bounding volume of an object available and use them for actual physics calculations. Bounding volumes are for "early out" optimization. You have an object with a bounding volume and a higher detail mesh. You can check for collision against the bounding volume (extremely cheap computationally), and if that fails, you can skip checking the more complicated collision mesh (extremely expensive compared to bounding sphere/AABB check).

So your solution would be to use a more detailed mesh for your actual physics calculations, and only use the bounding volume as an optimization. This high detail mesh doesn't actually have to represent exactly the underlying mesh of the object, it can be a low poly version of the original mesh, or it can be something like a collection of spheres which approximate the shape of the object. This is up to you.

There is rarely one bounding volume to fit them all. You should probably have separate bounding volumes for physics and graphics, since the needs for both are different. The graphics bounding volume can be a little looser because it's only used for culling, while the physics BV should tightly bound the visual representation. You may also use a series of progressively more detailed representations: first test against a bounding sphere, then versus convex hull of the mesh, then versus the actual mesh itself. This avoids checking the detailed representation more often than necessary.

At first blush, due to some bug in my code, the previous coding this post is not used!

And I've fixed it, and it works nicely except the objects are dead locked in certain areas.

Perhaps, I've to looked into cooperative pathfinding now.

Thanks for helping....