Releases

[thelusiv]

Hi, it seems that the next release is warming up quickly, so before you do it i'd like to point out some aspects.

Hi, welcome and thanks for your feedback progman. You have brought up a lot of topics and many of them deserve a full thread, or have a thread already.

1: Why the game is so slow even with hardware that runs latest CoD, Crysis, NFS ?
except small tracks, medium and big ones sunk the machine.
despite the fact that render is done directly by opengl, the performance is too bad.

Please quantify this:

• What hardware exactly?
  
• What platform/OS?
  
• What rendering settings are you using in VDrift and in other games?

Is your issue anything like this? http://vdrift.net/Forum/viewtopic.php?t=1374

disabling the shaders reduce the stress and makes those big tracks playable, but the particle effect is still there and looks like a big white cloud that covers the view !

Please provide a screenshot - this sounds like a known bug with the 2010-06-30 release: http://vdrift.net/Forum/viewtopic.php?t=1367

2: The coordinate system is a serious issue, as i understood, you're making a right-handed systems: OpenGL, Bullet work with left-handed data asset.
I don't think it's the best approch. it's better to transform once during the load process than to tweak the render and dynamic systems upside down every frame.

You're correct, the coordinate system is right-handed. Can you point out in the code where you feel the coordinate system conversion is deteriorating performance? Please make a new thread.

3: The car model parts and the materials(textures) should not be hardcoded, but instead specified in the definition file. in fact, what is the purpose of a separate glass model, or what if i want my car to be all-in-one, or what if i don't whant the cubemap reflection inside the car(as it is now!)

Please comment here:
http://vdrift.net/Forum/viewtopic.php?t=1427

4: Merge the track definition files to a single one and should be in XML format, as with car and why not the settings, configs and all the human readable files.

If you have a compelling argument for XML please present it in a separate thread. Back when the .config file format was written, Joe & I both disliked XML for several reasons (bloated, ugly, hard to manage, needs extra libs, VDrift does not have a great need for things like XSLT).

5: Is there a way to completely separate the game engine from the render system, some kind of virtualization or abstraction.

Of course there is, and development has slowly been moving in the direction of decoupling subsystems for a while now. It's a lot of work, so the GAME class is still quite large.

6: Last but not least: why the damn handbrake is not working ?

This belongs in the bugs forum, what release are you using?

This list is not exaustive, i'll submit more comming days.
thanks.

Thanks again for your input. Please create separate threads so that each issue can be discussed separately from others.

I forgot the most important ! Why you still using that ugly SCON build system !?
there are too many simple, elegant, portable and efficient build systems out there.

Which build system would you use and how would it be better? Again, please create a new thread.