Problem with Ray Casting

[Thaumaturge]

I seem to think that I’ve seen drwr or some other such dev comment to that effect.

And indeed, looking around, I found this post:

Visible geometry Collisions

This would do it: model.setCollideMask(BitMask32.bit(0)) This sets a single bit (bit 0) on the into collide mask of all GeomNodes and CollisionNodes at model and below. Since your from object probably has at least bit 0 set on its from collide mask (the default is most bits on), this will enable collisions with all GeomNodes under model. However, this is still a terrible idea. Collisions with visible geometry is about 100 times slower than collisions with actual collision geometry, even geom…

Note that drwr there indicates that visible geometry is less efficient for collision than even collision geometry of the exact same shape. And further that collision geometry is optimised for the purpose.

I’d guess that Panda has a different internal structure for collision geometry than for visible geometry, allowing faster traversals.

[edit]
Here’s an even clearer post:

Advantage of collision geometry over normal geometry

Collision geometry is far, far cheaper than visible geometry. Although it is true that simpler geometry is faster still, collision geometry would be about 100 times faster even if you exactly duplicated your visible geometry 1:1 in the scene graph. This is because the code path that supports visible geometry has to do it by creating a CollisionPolygon on the fly–each frame!–for each visible triangle in your mesh. This is necessary because the visible triangles don’t store all of the data that…

In particular, note this line:

Although it is true that simpler geometry is faster still, collision geometry would be about 100 times faster even if you exactly duplicated your visible geometry 1:1 in the scene graph.