Geometric Data Structures for Games: Index Structures

Index Structures: We continue our discussion of useful geometric data structure for computer games. So far we have discussed data structures for representing meshes (and more generally, cell complexes), geometric graphs (such as the visibility graph, θ-graph), and spatial subdivisions (such as the Delaunay triangulation). Usually, when we think of data structures for 1-dimensional data (such as hash maps, binary trees, and skip lists), the data structure is a means for efficiently accessing data based on a key value. A data structure that locates an object based on a key value is called an index structure.