If we keep pestering him, he'll cave eventually.

At the very, very least jcl could put AABB support back into gamestudio... I'm sure it can't be that hard to put back in.

Seriously...
WHY?
I just can´t get what you would need that for. As if the current one plus basicly any shape using physx would not be enough. Most other engines (for example Unity and ShiVa) do only have the ones supported by the physics engine and no one really complains.
There are much more important things for Gamestudio than collision shapes, so better learn coding, to do at least some things on your own. I btw really doubt that an AABB box would instantly solve all your problems and that the old system is gone without good reason...

i never used AABB, so i cant say what is better(and i couldn't use it with my commertial)! but there is onething i realy hate:
Why does the polygon-flag don't use polygon-colision-detection when the entity moves?(i know that's no bug and sorry for my bad english)
this makes my script x-times slower, to check which entitys the entity hits
thats one of the reasons why im trying to use physX for movent, fighting... EVERYTHING
xxxxxxx

Did you read Jibb's thread on the matter?

We need AABBs and/or cylinders because they have flat sides and flat bottoms. When you trace with an ellipsoid, you tend to get all kinds of crazy surface normals and data that's simply inaccurate. Ellipsoids just don't work for a number of game genres, specifically first person shooters.

physX is nice, but doesn't offer enough control for people who want to create proper actor movement, among other things.

Anyway, if ellipsoids are so great, why doesn't every other game engine in the world use them? Actually, why is Gamestudio the only game engine that uses them? Obviously they're not good for much. Last I checked, Unreal engine uses cylinders and id Tech uses AABBs. And they use them for a reason...

I actually think that the problem is not the lack of control, but the many possibilities to control things. The hard part is to setup the correct factors correctly to get the wanted simulation.

I didn´t state that ellipsoids are "so great". But in the end they also aren´t worse then especially AABB boxes.
I btw heavily doubt that the ellipsoidal bounding box is responsible for strange results when tracing.

PhysX is just too prone to problems. Even if you are able to properly set up enough fail safes to support normal actor movement in PhysX, you would be wasting tons of processing power, and the solution would be delicate and full of bugs. Full physics solutions tend to cause objects to bounce and jitter around their environment, which would make things look extremely ugly at best.

Once again, if this solution works well, why doesn't any other game developer use it?


Here's a test case: create a block in wed. Place an entity above the block, such that the entity is partly on top of the block but mostly off. Now use c_trace in combination with USE_BOX to trace straight downwards from the entity. A box or cylinder would give you a surface normal of 1, but since the trace is really using an ellipsoid you will get some crazy number between 1 and 0. That is bad.

So, once again: boxes and cylinders are used in every engine I can think of for a reason. They work 99% of the time, use little processing power compared to highly complicated solutions like PhysX, and are simple to create and maintain (relatively speaking). They are the optimal collision method for all types of games, from first person shooters, to platformers, beat-em-ups, sports games, and adventure games. So why does Gamestudio use ellipsoids, of all things?

Didn´t I already state above that Unity for example has no alternative to using PhysX for collision detection? Same for ShiVa, even though it uses ODE as far as I know. C4 on the other hand seem to offer alternatives, but the examples use its physics engine.
So there are indeed MANY developers using a physics engine for collission detection, as that actually is one of the main things such a physics engine is designed for. Which btw also includes raytracing...

If PhysX is all a developer needs, why does Gamestudio even have its own collision system?

Remember that their was a time when Phsyx were not integrated in the engine. This engine is very old, maybe older than you, Redeemer. Removing it now just just because there is an alternative way would be dumb.