Environment Collision

Dear NxOgres,

I hope I do not annoy you with a post that I am sure has been brought up many times. However I am overwhelmed with the searches and still have not found the best answer to my simple question...

An artist has created for me a 3-d indoor environment.

My question is, what is the fastest way to have it render and have collisions with it by CubeShapes. It should receive shadows but not cast any. It is in space so I don't need a floor, the environment should offer the floor.

Again please excuse me for my ignorance. I am an Ogre and NxOgre newb, but I have made some decent progress.

Ultimately, I also wish to know what is the best way to render the environment and the skybox (and of course have the physics work) but was not sure if I should move that to just the Ogre forum.

Also fyi, the collisions have to trigger sound effects with the environment -- I have implemented the collision callbacks to do so, but currently the volume is all the same no matter how far the collision happened to the player/listener (i.e. 2d sound not 3d)

When I mean the best/fastest rendering/colliding environment, I really mean it because my levels are large, it is a First Person Shooter demo with a lot of physics.

Thank you very much for your efforts in understanding my issue, concern, and point of view, and ignorance too....

In our game, we created a class called Level, which included a piece of StaticGemetry (The level mesh), and an NxOgre::Actor* built with a TriangleMesh. So far, the game doesn't appear to be taking any performance hits compiled in Release mode. CubeShapes would be a bit more complicated. I think you'd have to write a script to create cube shapes fitting all your box meshes (ie exported from MAX) by getting the AABB from each mesh, and creating the shape for it, while also noting their position in the environment.