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Swept Sphere
A swept sphere is a 3D object that can be created by pulling, or sweeping, a sphere along a path, leaving a trace that kind of resembles the shape of toothpaste when it comes out of the tube. While sweeping, the radius of the sphere may be changed, and the path does not need to be a straight line. Quite often, though, swept spheres are used in collision detection as an alternative to bounding boxes. In these cases, most of the time the path is a straight line and the radius stays fixed. The object that is created by sweeping a sphere like that is a cylinder with hemispheres, which have the same radius as the cylinder, attached to both ends. Detecting if a point is within this object is computationally quite simple, often easier than doing this with a bounding box.
TANSTAAFL
The abbreviation TANSTAAFL stands for "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch" and is quite often used by Michael Abrash when he talks about optimization. It means that whatever you do, there's always a trade-off, be it size, speed, or the developer's nerves.


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