Comments - CodeGrizzly

Dogfights and Hoarding. More like collecting LEGO bricks. Hahaha your ship was awesome though.

When testing collision against an "amalgamated" blob, that is ship with modules attached, we have a special compose structure in the physics engine. Collision is still checked against each individual module and the ship but impulse responses from the collision are passed up to this "composed body" which applies it to the whole set of objects. That way we maintain our collision precision on large complex bodies while still getting correct physical responses as the composed body moves and rotates as a whole.

We made some tests early on in the project and had support for mesh vs mesh collision. However for the ships and modules that meant creating collision meshes, as the original meshes were quite high poly. That would accumulate to more work for the artists and more strain on the asset format loading. For general queries like "ship vs ship" or "ship vs module" it was decided that given the speed of the game an approximation using a box would be sufficient. However for the environment we use a specially designed hierarchy for triangle precision collision detection using no simplification on the geometry. From what I have learned many physics engines only employ mesh collision on static objects as well. An extension that would be possible and not to difficult would be to allow "ray-mesh" collision for ships and modules as well. However given the scale of each individual module in our game I would say it is quite unnecessary.