My first questions: How to get started, and cd thoughts

[goodnewsjim]

Hello,

I'm working on a project now where I was going to go P2P and do client hit detection at first. This would have reduced the hit detection load by a great deal. The problem with P2P and client hit detection is that you need to deal with a lot of hack detection/prevention. I was willing to go that route, but we got a new guy on our crew who says he can get almost as much performance from a server as you can get with P2P.

I do not own Visual Studio because I'm not willing to pay a minimum of $500 for it. I have MinGW. Is it possible to compile Bullet with MinGW?

I am interested in solid body physics collision detection. I merely need to know if things run into each other. Things could be of varying size. Which package do I download?

I know Bullet uses multithreaded GPU which is great. (I don't know the proper name for these two algorithms)"Does it check incrementally based on the distance it traveled" or "does it make a custom shape approximating the path of the object"?

Checking incrementally based on how far it traveled is this(simplified): Number of checks: width of object/distance traveled. Then you check each step of the way. I found checking incrementally is a slow way to do things, but works to a degree.

Creating a custom shape approximating the path works like this: You have a set of points based on the outside edges of the mesh for the start position, and you have those points for the end position. You then connect the points together to form a large mesh. Then you check to see if other meshes hit this custom shape. The strength of this collision detection algorithm is that it doesn't matter how fast the object is traveling, its path is approximated by a mesh.

The second algorithm could be increased in speed if you have a tree of nearby objects which can potentially be hit depending on your velocity.

I do often reinvent the wheel, but it seems like it would be some complex math and optimization to get unlimited velocity collision detection to work. As such, I'm going with Bullet. I like the license on Bullet that it can be used freely for commercial applications. The SDK is confusing because it seems like it is all example projects: How should I get started with variable sized solid collision for up to 100k-1000k objects at once?