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[thelusiv]

I guess it's me. Not happy with the cars at all. But it's my own fault I know.

I was basing that on the thread requesting help to update cars for new suspension points. This is a pretty common issue with VDrift, new features are added to the game, and the data must be updated to support it. With n being number of new data features and d being the number of data files to update, it is always an n * d operation to perform the update, and as d is always increasing, the problem will only get larger.

My personal nightmare. Having one car, track doing well and spend another year fixing the other 36, eventually pissing off the few contributors we've got. I am already abusing them as testers running the trunk unstable.

The problem is that this issue will come up over and over. I think that VDrift needs some solution to this problem that will address it long term. The work you are doing now on improving the car format will go a long way to reducing the need to do it in the future, but it will not fix the problem permanently.

Here are some ideas that would make this problem easier to deal with:

• branch the data repository when new code branches are made that will affect data format.
  
• make sure new settings in data files take on good defaults, so that loading old data files still works, but without new features.
  
• write migration scripts to automate changes to data file format.
  
• embed a revision number or version number in the data files to indicate which format they were created with. this will help with both the previous bullets.
  
• (come up with a regular release schedule and) only make major changes to data file formats at major releases, so that the "data API" is known to contributors at every release, and publish a list of changes (as well as a data format migration script, perhaps) to this API to make transitions easy.
  
• ensure that data contributors are up to the task of performing updates on their contributed data before data format changes are made.
  
• choose a small number (10 or less) of "reference" cars and tracks to include in every release, which the developers will maintain as they make changes to the data formats, and which data contributors can use as examples to update their community maintained data.

While that last bullet may be distasteful to some, it is a reality that a small project can't sustain an increasingly large number of data files on its own - it must rely on community contributors to create and maintain much of the data. Likewise, the project must ensure that the community is not overwhelmed with work when changing data formats, so a balance must be struck between these goals: data format features (and subsequently game features), contributor enthusiasm and workload, and release schedule.

Those are just my suggestions on data, but I think it would go a long way to decreasing time between releases, and subsequent frustration of users and contributors. I also think that simply reorganizing the data repository would make a big difference, or perhaps splitting it into a few separate repositories.

I could help enact some or all of these changes if the other people involved in the project agree that they would be helpful.

Thoughts?