Tony's Blog

While making our collision system we kept in mind the idea of someday implementing it with a collision detection library other then our own. As a result we designed the collision system to be easily implemented with any collision library. The changes to the implementation are invisible to the rest of the engine. I wrote an implementation for the collision system which included basic intersections between oriented bounding boxes, spheres, and rays. After finishing the initial implementation we decided to use the Open Dynamics Engine. ODE is a nice open-source physics library for simulating rigid body dynamics. Under the rigid body physics system it has a very simple and easy to use collision detection system. I was saddend to see my collision implementation go but its tragic death was not in vain. It allowed us to create a nice collision system which was not tied to or influenced by any existing collision library’s API. This made implementing the collision system with ODE a very straightforward task.