rendering by Ogre

[joevenzon]

Many tracks are modeled with a lot of very small objects that can probably be combined for better performance in situations where the draw calls are expensive. On my test machines it was actually cheaper to not do much combining and take the cull advantage (especially with newer ATI drivers), but there's object combining code in VDrift, it's just disabled. If you look in GAME::LoadTrack, the third to last argument to DeferredLoad is false, you can change that to true to do more object combining:

track.DeferredLoad(pathmanager.GetTrackPath()+"/"+trackname, pathmanager.GetEffectsTexturePath(), *tracknode, settings.GetTrackReverse(), settings.GetAnisotropy(), settings.GetTextureSize(), graphics.GetShadows(), false, info_output, error_output)

EDIT: this is wrong. I forgot that this doesn't actually combine meshes, it just combines scenegraph elements.

Using a texture atlas you could combine even more objects.

I dislike the Ogre architecture, and enjoy writing rendering systems myself anyway, so I'm going to continue to develop VDrift's rendering system... but perhaps there is room for two rendering systems?