Hi,
Server programmer here trying to work on an Irrlicht-based online game. Here's my problem. Within the (non-graphics based) server engine, I have to read in scene geometry, preprocess it to a lower LOD (for efficiency), then use it to perform collision detection to validate client-side moves. Alternately, I suppose I could rely upon predrawn invisible "collision bumpers" within the scene itself, and just preprocess out those.
In either case though, I've got to be able to read and understand the scene geometry data structures and perform basic collision detection on them. I realize this is a question probably beyond the scope of this forum, but if anyone can point me in the right direction in the way of resources, I'd be very grateful. I'm an experienced server-side C++ programmer, but I am unfortunately utterly ignorant on graphics programming.
Preprocessing scenes for server-side collision detection
Ask your graphic developers about the library they use to load 3D mesh data. Also you can look at other available free libraries, like Assimp. Also you might need some 3D math (for example here http://www.geometrictools.com). Possibly things here might be useful too: http://vterrain.org
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