hi, is it besser to only deal with triangles to build all comples objects? i have read many articles about col detection and all those articles deal with triangles for colliding planes. greets&thanks gammastrahler

As a general rule, triangle meshes should have corresponding geometric approximations. In games, a player is drawn as a collection of triangles, but represented for physics purposes as a simple box. Similarly, though levels are rendered as triangles, they are often stored in the form of convex polyhedra. In short, you need to be able to quickly extract at runtime two representations from whatever data you load at loadtime: triangles for rendering, and some simpler geometric form for physics calculations.



Edited by - TerranFury on January 10, 2002 5:57:58 PM

In fact, lots of recent physics engines do trimesh based collision detection, at least on some models (player). This is where triangles come in handy: they have a very simple mathematical representation, and collision detection is fast and simple. If you use arbitrary polygons, then things get messy, especially if you start using concave ones (and you are definitely doomed with self-intersecting polys ).

- AH