Good question. I'm fairly certain that most of them were imports he did from Racer cars on racer-xtreme. I am fairly certain the TL and TL2 were originals of his though. I'm having trouble coming up with much on the forums, it seems the search function doesn't like very short search phrases like "CO". I'll look more carefully at his post history later, and maybe try to email him.
The big con outweighs those pros. It's not acceptable to say "hey go find them and install them yourself, it's only a few steps and you only need to install an SVN client and they might not actually work anyway depending on if there have been data changes since the last release." If we really want to go after those pros, we should go down the path of the auto-updater.
I agree with joe here. I think if you want to trim down the main game data, either you need a larger add-on pack (high maintenance) or have some kind of cars/tracks download tool built in to the game.
Hmmm, good point about data formats changing. What about this: release with only the cars/tracks that are licensed freely and working properly, and provide another package (as charlieg suggests) that includes as many as possible cars and tracks that are working properly (for instance, do not include cars that roll over on every turn, or don't drive properly for other reasons).
I think we could maintain a list of which data is in what state, and automate building a "vdrift-data-good" package from that, reducing maintenance overhead. (In the past we did this with vdrift-data-full and vdrift-data-minimal packages.)
thelusiv Wrote:In the past we did this with vdrift-data-full and vdrift-data-minimal packages.
The reason we stopped doing that was that it was a lot of work and full data is huuuuge. Just the minimal package (which is what we've been releasing) is like 500 MB.
Yeah, I remember. Maybe a "vdrift-data-best" package is a better approach. I think users might be happiest with an executable package that's ~30 MiB and a optional data package that's ~500 MiB.
I still don't really like it if we're not including executables with the same data that people have been used to getting, but I'm fine with two versions of the packages: minimal w/ executables, medium w/ executables... as long as you handle making the minimal package. :-)
Fixing weight distribution revealed another issue. Changing the weight distribution of the 350 for example from the current to a realistic one 53:47 makes it almost impossible to drive using keyboard. You'll get some nasty power and lift-off oversteer effects.
The question is how to handle this. Adjust car parameters to make them easy to drive(like atm) or implement some stability control, steering assist.
