okay, i''ve just begun looking into continuous collision detection and was wondering if any of you lot had any thoughts on it? i''m wondering what the trade-off for speed is when using the formulae (every site i''ve been on says it''s a lower method than discrete, but more accurate) or any other info that might prove useful when my boxes are falling through the floor. thanks

are you referring to resting contact? if so im in search of a similar answer.

you could try reading

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/baraff/www/pbm/rigid1.pdf

and then

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/baraff/www/pbm/rigid2.pdf

they helped me understand the basic concepts, although resting collision is apparently not an easy thing to calculate, it requires some pretty nasty quadratic computation :s

i think the way i will eventually fudge it is to just provide a frictionless contact force to the resting object in question every frame to keep it from sinking into the floor.

ive got a thread in this forum that has kinda morphed onto the same subject (namely the latest post), its title is "mass, forces and angular acceleration" heres the link:

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=154574

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." - Aristotle

I think MENTAL was looking for something like this:
http://www-rocq.inria.fr/~redon/research.htm

Continuous collision detection seems like a good solution for well behaved systems, but less useful for complex ones.