Wanting to code a simple 3D virtual world, I looked into the recent spatial indexes SOC work, which depends on the proposed geometry library.
I have to admit I was fairly disappointed. So I'm going to put some critics, some quite harsh maybe, along with some ramblings about what I would have liked to have. Note that I am no geometry or space indexing expert, so what I say may be perfectly silly.
[...] Mathias, Thanks for your interest in the SpatialIndex GSoC project. I agree about that the indexes lack a lot of features and they're very limited (for example, they are only for 2D now). But remember that this is the work that we have done in a bit more than two months from the ground up (this time include reading the papers about the indexes, writing little documentation, writing unit tests, finding data to test, integrate with the geometry proposal, etc), so it's still has a long road to be usable (as I say in my email). Some remarks: - You are able to find all elements within a certain range, if you mean by range a box. Or you can use a box and then refine the result filtering out the elements that are not in your area. - About "Being able to index arbitrary objects and not just points". You can insert the envelopes of arbitrary geometries and a pointer to the real object as the data. Maybe it's not the best interface to do this, but a lot of libraries (i.e. GEOS) use this approach. Since GSoC ended I didn't have the time to do much more than minor changes. I hope having more time in the following weeks/months. Anyway, your critics are very good and they will be part of my ToDo list from now on. Of course, any contribution is welcome too. Thanks again! -- federico