Hello, I'm not ignoring everyone. I've been moving house this weekend. Boxes everywhere, haven't got a broadband connection, shut my thumb in the car door, etc, etc...
Anyway.
I've been using ODE in OGRE already. Isn't it built into Ogre?
In case it hasn't been mentioned before; Ogre is a graphics engine. It has no collision detection or physics simulation built in. Yes, it comes with the ReferenceApplicationLayer (note the name!), but that's just an example of how to integrate an external library with Ogre. There a quite a few bits of ODE missing from there.
This library attempts to cover every bit of ODE's functionality, and keep it wrapped up nicely in C++.
I'm saying that if each part of the heli is a seperate mesh/node/proxy combo, the distances between eah part will have to be trial and error guessing unless monster has a script he can read from to set this for him.
Indeed. Actually I get the position and location of the different parts from my modeler (AC3D) by highlighting the parts I want to wrap up and reading the values it gives me for the selection bounding box. But, yes, currently they're hardcoded.
At the moment the library is just a complete wrapper around ODE. It adds a bit of extra functionality, but not much. Pretty much whatever you would do in a normal ODE application you do in this wrapper. But there's the wiring there to connect Ogre SceneNodes to ODE bodies, and all the data types (Quaternions, Vector3, etc) are Ogre ones so you don't have to bother converting them yourself.
Eventually you should be able to, for example, give the library a SceneNode and it will create compound geoms from the attached entities and even the sub-meshes that those entities use. But that's in the future. As is the ability to create ragdolls automatically based on skeletons, and vehicles based on SceneNodes with certain fixed naming conventions.
Now, which box was that network router in...