Features Whislist (ordered by desire), please annotate

[joevenzon]

Normal mapping and LOD models to help us get past the 3500 face limit. A specular map for the car body material. Specular and normal maps for the track surface multi-texturing in the track to allow for skid marks on top of a tiled track texture

By specular maps -- do you mean a map where white is shiny and black is not? If so, specular maps are supported for any surface. There's only support for one set of texture coordinates, so the mapping has to be the same as the diffuse map at the moment. The specular mapping isn't used for much at the moment, although some of the cars use it a little. Take a look at data/cars/XS/textures/body-misc1.png. A red pixel value of 1 means fully shiny, and red pixel value of 0 means not shiny at all. If you take any texture and put "-misc1" at the end of it, it'll be loaded in as a specular map and applied to whatever object loads the base texture.

There's no hard 3500 face limit. The only reason there's no LOD yet is because no one has made a fancy enough model or one with multiple levels of detail. :-) If you make such a model, I'll add LOD support. It shouldn't be hard at all.

Object-space normal maps can be added without much trouble. Tangent-space normal maps would be harder. If the normal maps shared the same texture coordinates with the diffuse and specular maps, that'd make things really simple -- my .joe format only supports one set of texture coordinates at the moment, and changing the format would require some major work (which is why the skid marks bit would be tough).

If I add normal map support I might change the -misc1 files so the specular map is in the alpha channel and put the normals in RGB.