VDrift Graphical Upgrades

[zimluura]

oh, this conversation has been posted, cool. i was just now wishing i had posted instead of pmed.

i now understand how vbos work allot better. i'm certain the tire mesh code is a little off. in the app it is written for immediate mode rendering where face indexes have their own texture coordinates rather than each tex coord having to be sent to the graphics card with the vertex. but when i see, exactly in what way it's off, i'll be able to make it work exactly how vdrift wants it. i'm thinking i'll be able to get rid of 30% of the lines.

what i need to talk about right now is the rims. i've been doing a few of them. and sizing them at 1.0x1.0x1.0 is probably not such a great idea. it means scaling the rim to be all super thick and bulgey in blender. which means it won't look anything like it would in the game. so i'm thinking we make the rims in blender so that they fit inside a 1.0m radius(or maybe diameter??) circle just as if that circle were the edge of the rim (the to_be_generated rim edge that will have the same number of circular segments as the tire). then the artist makes the thickness of the rim whatever looks correct. finally (in code) we scale the whole thing (xyz) by a single scalar so it fits in the rim edge just as it did in the circle. and the thickness of the spokes (and vertex normals for that matter) get don't need to be recalculated.


i've been making rim.blend files in the car's directory. since i'm re-importing the .joe files anyway i'm wondering if it would be good to leave the .blend files in the directory so people could modify them more easily. or should there be another data resource maybe for blend files? is there an easy way to add them to the regular data repo with a flag that says they're not downloaded unless specifically requested. so the bandwidth cost doesn't go up for people who just want to play the game?? would there be any legal/ethical reasons for not posting the .blends for the cars??

anybody have any ideas on the many questions i'm posing?