Why not build a track system on top of
OpenSceneGraph? Now Joe, I know you like to write everything yourself. :wink: But it looks like this is just what we need minus the track itself - basically it would support all our scenery and terrain. It would also provide the interface to the GL "world" as well.See their "about" page for all the details. Here's a few of the more succulent points:[QUOTE BY="openscenegraph.org"]Performance Supports view frustum culling, occlusion culling, small feature culling, Level Of Detail (LOD) nodes, state sorting, vertex arrays and display lists as part of the core scene graph. These together make the OpenSceneGraph one of the highest performance scene graph available. User feedback is that performance matches or surpasses that of much more established scene graphs such as Performer, VTree, Vega Scene Graph and Java3D! The OpenSceneGraph also supports easy customization of the drawing process, such as implementation of Continuous Level of Detail (CLOD) meshes on top of the scene graph (see Virtual Terrain Projection and Demeter).[/QUOTE]So, performance is pretty good, as good as it gets for a system like this. It looks like we'll have to have these features one way or another in our system, whatever it is...we already have some of them and the others would be nice but tough to do (like occlusion culling).[QUOTE BY="openscenegraph.org"]Productivity The core scene graph encapsulates the majority of OpenGL functionality including the latest extensions, provides rendering optimizations such as culling and sorting, and a whole set of add on libraries which make it possible to develop high peformance graphics applications very rapidly. The application developer is freed to concentrate on content and how that content is controlled rather than low level coding.[/QUOTE]So basically, Joe would spend his time working on gameplay improvements rather than shadow drawing bugs and the like.They go on to say how portable it is:[QUOTE BY="openscenegraph.org"]originally developed on IRIX, then ported to Linux, then to Windows, then FreeBSD, Mac OSX, Solaris, HP-UX and even PlayStation2![/QUOTE]I know this idea isn't all so likely to be used since Joe hates adding unnecessary libraries...but I think this might really cut out a ton of the work needed for a good scenery system, again enabling our small developer resources to focus on the track itself.
