Different surfaces?

[alex25]

What about a global game file that is loaded first and then (if it exists) the track file. If entries with the same name exists in the latter just override them.

for any one track there could exist more than one grass or asphalt surface. how would you handle that in a general way? my favourite is neurburgring where i ended up defining quite a few surfaces for the track itself (different bumpiness, friction coefficients, etc.) not to mention the side roads, pit lanes, escape lanes and so on. every track that i worked on has multiple materials for any type of surface. personally i think that by putting everything into one file we would lose a lot of flexibility when it comes to making tracks. tracks are just as different from each other as are cars. an engine file for an F1 car won't be really useful to a fiat 500. a "road" surface for a F1 circuit is completely different from a "road" surface for dirt racing for example (even though we don't have any dirt tracks yet) or even a regular road.

--alex--