Hello,
going through the RSC Motorsport's forum, an idea went through my mind
I wrote this post on the RSC forum, here is the link
http://forum.rscnet.org/showthread.php?t=276118
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I try to keep it brief, so don't think any of this is exhaustive
I think it's too bad how unrelated to each other the free sims are (at least, vDrift and Motorsport) while sim-racing is supposed to be a community
here I'm listing
some of the problems that this and open-source development seems to raise :
_it not very clear who is working on what. vDrift's people can't give me wrong
_we don't have any idea of what people are able or expecting to do, why they failed trying to help, and so on
_about the simulator itself, only programmers (who knows C++ very well) can really work, but what does it have to do with sim-racing itself ?
_I reckon that in order to improve the code, the programmer actually need to go through and understand a lot of code, with few or no help at all, and that might take him a discouraging amount of time
_I'm seeing much more people AROUND racing-sim development that IN it, and I reckon that's because developers are losts while others (modders, the people who make packages, ...) know what to do, where to begin and where to end
_we're reinventing the wheel many times, while the job is often very similar
_...
What I propose is :
_1 : a gathered people management. Everyone who is interested about doing something (... anything) about sim-racing is free and invited to signup and to fill some forms telling us what he can do, what he want to do, what operating systems he uses, what sim he'd prefer to work on or not, what he's actually on to, etc. ... further, we'll keep track of what he's working on
_2 : thinking standards and shared resources. It's pretty obvious why this might be annoying to commercial sims, but there is no such reason in free sims. I'm thinking tracks or cars creator tool and file formats, loaders, you name it. It doesn't mean we have to use it, but we can, and preferably easily
_3 : modularized development. Finding common needs, specify interfaces and let teams develop modules describing it apart from the rest of the sim, and that can work on several sims without touching the code. I'm keeping it short so just try to see what I mean and the way of doing it
it's quite easy to see how this points are related to each other, and I let you imagine what can go out of it
right now I propose that you, developers, modders... anyone thinking having something to propose or improve... tell me what you think about what I'm saying (problems and proposition)
