Ideas on track format

[zimluura]

just to clarify: the trees and destructable environments were supposed to look like sub-entry of the "shared object library" heading.

so for the trees i was thinking still have them be 3d modeled. just not storing the mesh inside the track data. just have a position (+rotation & scale) for the tree listed in the track file and the tree just gets drawn from the shared object library. still gives the option for making special case trees that have their meshes defined in the track file. tire walls, chain link fences, crowds and other stuff *could* be done this way too, though with varying needs for parameters passed when declaring an instance in the track definition.

was thinking allot about how doing 3 lod models for 8 trees is allot of work, but doing them for all the trees in the nurburgring sounds completely insurmountable. and then ontop of that, in 3 years when videocards are 5 times as powerful it wouldn't be that bad to model a single higher level of detail for each tree. and then wham, every track has another level of pretty for its trees. but it's theoretical to me ie; could be that it'll take 20 indigenous and 20 deciduous to get things properly differentiated, and that's a tall work order.

dynamic sky: i saw some shots of it in the album, thought it looked really cool. was hoping it hadn't been totally abandoned. hadn't thought too much about modeling the distant hills in with the rest of the track stuff, but that does make perfect sense. only problem i can see is that micro vs. macro in the same 3d modeler scene has, in my experience, been sorta tricky. that said i haven't been using blender for very long, and most of my experience is from truespace.