Harey, wrt Raven/config tools and that Gallardo.
I'll just explain what happens and how it'd be better changed.
I like green, so I choose a green lambo. Cosmo likes red, so he chooses a red one.
I see Cosmo as green, he sees me as red.
Add in you playing with a blue lambo, and despite us all having different colours we actually all look the same to each other in game.
Since networking uses the car folder for the look, and raven variants only work for the local car within that folder, we all get the same car.
The only solution is many cars. lambo_red, lambo_green, lambo_blue etc. And maybe even lambo_red_silver_wheels, lambo_red_black_wheels etc etc.
Downloading and maintaining all those cars is a real pain.
It'd be awesome if actually we just had a new system managed by something like Raven.
We place cars in a new folder, say... racer/data/car_master
Raven then reads out car_master and deploys all the files and car folders needed to racer/data/cars
Yes the folder for cars is huge, but we can tend to not go in there much any more, and let Raven manage them, update them, delete them etc.
Yes it could get messy, break etc, but hey.
Then when we play online we just choose the car we want via Raven, which only lists data/car_master cars, and subsequent sub-options, not the huge long list in data/cars.
We can then play online and see each other properly. It 'looks' just like Raven variants to the user in the Raven UI, but it works right for multiplayer.
In a way we already used to do this manually back in the 049 days. Stecki had about 10 downloads for his Mini for example. You'd download them all and have to manage/update/upgrade them all manually.
ALL that could be automated from a master folder. Raven can just reference some config.ini file in the car folder that lists all the files/folders needed for each car. A bit like rFactor options blocks.
Obviously the car graphics load is higher (mesh+texture), and render load higher (draw calls maybe, so we'd need to make sure cars aren't inefficient.
As I've noted a few times before, even a rough conversion from Forza3 or something *should* be able to be squished down into 10-15 draw calls quite easily with some extra effort (a few hours)... those cars with about 50-100 draw calls are just not going to play well either way.
In theory we could do this with tracks too, but since we all want to 'see' the same track in multiplayer, we can use batch scripts running through Raven (or a Raven config.ini per track) to set properties, so we don't need to duplicate tracks entirely (ie, rainy, cloudy, sunny, night time, etc)
I'm relatively quiet right now so I'll get working on my Z4 again. At this stage it should be quite trivial to make some good progress as all the foundations have been laid. It's just my perfectionist nature holds me back haha, but a finished 3d car would be good for my CV as much as it'd be good for Racer!
As much as I know I can make a complete car, I'm still going to need lots of input from others so mine covers all the features others think are important too, then we can make sure we can do all the features we want consistently alongside all the others we need.
Most important is that we cover everything everyone wants in one car imo, then anyone *should* be able to make anything they want and have a working reference, and can then improve from there if they want.
Checking RC5c (or somewhere around there) does everything we need will also be important too. That'll need a bunch of us to multiplay at some point with scripts (FF scripts especially, I know my FF script was tweaking Cosmo's FF once haha!)
The Gallardo is quite script heavy, but fairly well optimised, so if we can strap different scripts onto it to check things out and it all remains reliable then we're good to go I think.
Checking ATI support will be handy too, as long as we can get ATI users mostly happy that'll be good. I think RC5c was quite reliable in this area. But testing certainly required. I'm all nVidia (760/1060) here.
I've got a few tracks as WIP, at least one can be finished up to work ok. Again the most important thing is adding in everything we reasonably want to use. Shading, sounds/surfaces stuff, any scripting for cool stuff like moving objects etc.
Hmmmmm
Dave
