Need link to level build specifications page.

[David_Mac]

Hello all- experienced Blender user here keen to get started developing a track (or two) for VDrift. I've been bouncing about the site looking for any information concerning the specifications that you require, and the only resources I've been able to find are kart tutorials.

I'm keen to track down some information concerning
i) recommended tri limits for a map.
ii) object count recommended for a map.
iii) texture resolution limits and number of UVs supported.
iv) textures and effects supported within the engine: Specular maps, bump maps, emit maps, normal maps (tangent or global/world), etc.
v) any information at all on your in-game lighting system.

Any links to resources greatly appreciated, any contact with established Vdrift map developers greatly appreciated, too :lol:

Thanks

[thelusiv]

Hi and welcome! It's nice to have an experienced 3D artist interested in the project. I'll do my best to answer your questions and Joe can fill in anything I miss.

recommended tri limits for a map.

Hmmm, that's hard to say, but I think a number in the tens of thousands would more or less be fine. To be honest I'm not sure what the tri counts on our existing maps are.

object count recommended for a map.

I know existing tracks have probably 100 - 400 objects.

texture resolution limits and number of UVs supported.

As far as texture resolution I know of no hard limits. <= 512x512 would be fine, I think you can pretty much make them the size you need. I believe there is one UV per track object.

textures and effects supported within the engine: Specular maps, bump maps, emit maps, normal maps (tangent or global/world), etc.

Again Joe can correct me, but I think we have none of that stuff, except for specular maps, in the form of a single specular map that is applied to the cars on all the tracks. We used to have dynamic reflections but they're gone now. There has recently been a rewrite of the graphics subsystem and not everything has been re-implemented in the new scenegraph-based system.

any information at all on your in-game lighting system.

This thread has a little info about lighting, it probably won't tell you much but here it is anyway: http://vdrift.net/Forum/viewtopic.php?t=504

Any links to resources greatly appreciated, any contact with established Vdrift map developers greatly appreciated, too

If you've read all the stuff under the Tracks section of the wiki, that's about all the written information available short of looking at source code. Here's a thread about creating a custom track (most of our tracks are imported...) which Joe modeled in Blender, it is still available in the VDrift data repository but has no scenery. http://vdrift.net/Forum/viewtopic.php?t=801

If you're willing to spend some time developing a track with some or all of the features you mentioned, it's possible that stuff may get added to the game. I'm not sure we've had any tracks that had such features to even test.

I'll go ahead and warn you, our current track editor is kind of a hack and there aren't really many binaries available for it. We've started work on a new track editor but it's far from finished and has stalled. After the next VDrift release I think I'll try to pick it back up because a lot of people have been interested in tracks lately.

[joevenzon]

i) recommended tri limits for a map.

I'm about to head out for work so I can't look into this in much detail at the moment, but this should be similar to other racing games like GTR, GTR2, etc.

ii) object count recommended for a map.

Thelusiv was a bit low; most of our maps have thousands of objects. Even the small ones have more than 1000. That's mostly because of the way that they were converted from other formats, though, and more objects decreases performance, so keep it under 2000.

iii) texture resolution limits and number of UVs supported.

The Paul Ricard '88 track uses one 2048x2048 texture and several 1024x1024 textures, and seems to run fine. The game dynamically resizes textures down if users have texture detail set to medium (half resolution) or low (quarter resolution). So, something similar to the paul ricard textures would be OK.

iv) textures and effects supported within the engine: Specular maps, bump maps, emit maps, normal maps (tangent or global/world), etc.

Specular maps are supported for all track objects. I'll have to check but I think emit maps (self illumination, right?) are supported but I'd need to make a quick code change to have the engine actually look for emit maps for track objects. Support for tangent-space or world space normal maps would be easy to add but isn't currently in there... mainly because we don't have any art that uses 'em. If you want to use normal maps then feel free and I'll add support to the engine.

v) any information at all on your in-game lighting system.

If you understand GLSL shaders, the best place to go is to the source: data/shaders/full/fragment.glsl. Here's a synopsis:

Code:

ambient = the color lookup from the diffuse texture

notshadowfinal = the percentage not in shadow

diffuse = the color lookup from the diffuse texture * the dot product of the normal and the light position * notshadowfinal

gloss = the lookup from the specular map

invgloss = 1.0 - gloss

specular_sun = a specular highlight calculated based on the reflection vector, currently fixed at power 128 blended with power 4 (seems to look good for cars, but I've been meaning to improve the generality of this calculation)

specular_environment = texture lookup from an environment cubemap * gloss * reflectivity based on eye position (so when you look directly at something it's not as reflective as when you see it from a glancing angle -- it works well for car paint)

tu6_2D_val = emit map

final color = ambient*0.5 + diffuse*0.8*max(0.7,invgloss) + specular_sun*notshadowfinal + specular_environment*max(0.5,notshadowfinal) + tu6_2D_val.rgb;

[David_Mac]

Just the inormation I was after :wink: Thank you Joe & Lusiv. I look forward to getting a level design proposition up for you within the week. I'm keen to ensure that any work that I submit fits within your community's vision for the game.

If you're not using a wide range of maps at this point I won't push you to squeeze them in to the game. I'd rather start with basic colour/diffuse maps and add additional detail when & if it suits your project. I'm afraid that I don't understand GLSL shaders at this point, but I've got a good engine-saavy friend who'll be comfortable explaining the remifications to me over a beer a little later in the week.

Congrats on some fantastic work getting your game to this point- hope to see you in a WIP thread soon.

[joevenzon]

Congrats on some fantastic work getting your game to this point- hope to see you in a WIP thread soon.

Thanks, can't wait! :-)