Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Of course, all general debugging strategies such as liberal use of
assert()
calls
apply as well. A good discussion of such strategies is found in [McConnell93,
Chapter 26].
2.8
Summary
This chapter has outlined the many factors that must be considered when designing
and implementing a collision detection system. It talked about possible collision
geometry representations, and whether to use rendering geometry or specialized
geometry to perform collision tests. Collision processing was defined as taking place
in two phases, the narrow and broad phase. The broad phase is concerned with
coarsely identifying small subgroups of potentially colliding objects, whereas the
narrow phase performs the detailed pairwise collision tests between objects. Narrow-
phase testing is the primary topic of Chapters 4 and 5, where many different query
types on a wide variety of geometrical object representations are discussed. Narrow-
phase testing is also discussed in Chapter 9. Broad-phase methods are discussed in
Chapters 6 through 8. The importance of robustness was stressed. This topic devotes
two full chapters to the topic of robustness, Chapters 11 and 12. Because this topic
is about collision detection for real-time applications, performance was also stressed
as an important system consideration. In some respect, the majority of the topic
is about performance in that efficient algorithms and data structures are discussed
throughout. The topic concludes with discussion of optimization, in Chapter 13.
