Hi all,

I have a few questions,

Firstly, i want to use an external physics engine to deal with collision detection and other physics, i am looking at ODE and Newton, has any one tried these and if so which do you recommend, and if there are any others i should think about. My at the moment can contain anything from 10,000 triangles to 100,000,000 and more so i would like an engine that can cope with this or a way that i can update the information on the fly.

Secondly, i want to create a height map face, if that makes any sense, basicly like a bumpmap but with physical bumps instead of updating the image all the time, im trying to use a standard height map engine but its not as easy as i thought, basicly i have 2 textures, the first is the normal texture and the second is the heightmap both textures are either 128x128 or 256x256 but of course the face that i want to put it on could be either 10x10 (XY) or 10x100 (XY) so how can i stretch or repeat the height map to the scale of the face? and how can i align the texture to the whole heightmap instead of each triangle/quad?

I am aware theres an extension to do this, but my laptop does not support this extension and i want to support older cards too!

Finally, does anyone know of a fast way of loading textures in to OpenGL, at the moment i have 680 textures (Jpg, png and tga) and it takes about 3minutes to load them all .
Im not too worried about this in my engine, because it will only load the textures needed, but in my editors i need to load them all.

Thanx for any help and suggestions