W-E-C's car thread

[Haruna]

[XRRoy68210]

Why SD rocks? Because I can enjoy it at 60 FPS with Intel 945G embedded video chip! Fuck those graphic monsters, they need you to pay tons of fucking cash so you can enjoy them.

Oh and to W-E-C: How should I make those TRB-1 cars work? I've dropped their files into individual folders (something named like "trb1-car01"), and they just won't show up in the game. What are the proper folder names for them?

[W-E-C]

@XRRoy68210: the name of the folder must be the same as the name of the .xml-file of the car, e.g. car5a-trb1.xml needs a folder called car5a-trb1.
sometimes a category file is needed as well (when its not one of the games standart categories), which i normally put into a separate zip. this must be copied into the "categories" folder


@Haruna:
even tough it's OT, i'd like to stick my oar in on the engine topic:
problem is that there is noone with regular OpenGL/3D-programming experience willing to help out on the project, not even on a consulting basis (JP, Xavier, Simon, Kilo et. al. are doing their best, but i think no one of them is working regularly with OpenGL/3D and has to invest much time in preliminary research)

a few things strike me as odd with the engine however:
- according to discussions elsewhere (and also to according to berniw) the use of 2-sided polies in greater quantity should give a rather notcable performance penalty but most of the older SD-tracks are completely 2-sided and do not perform better when converted to onesided polies (at least when i tried it)
- using the accc tool on cars/tracks should boost the drawing of the cars significantly because not every poly is drawn singly but in reality it has only very limited impact on the framecount
- the use of LOD's doesn't give much improvement (i had 6 fps improvement with 10 opponents, when all opponents were reduced to last LOD (which was below 100 tris) to albeit on rather old PC)

therefore i'm not sure if the graphics engine is the main bottleneck here (apart from lacking features)

on the subject of polycount:
i think your comparison with S2U is unlucky, because many details are not needed for SD (engine etc), NFS the Run is more like it and there the polycount is according to
http://speedhunters.com/archive/2011/11 ... d-run.aspx
about 25 k including the wheels (tough for my part i could not manage something similarly goodlooking with that poly budget)

Also the LS1 cars have about 4-6k triangles, and the RS1-FMC even has 9k (all withot wheels), so it's not all that bad.

[XRRoy68210]

Now I can drive them, thanks for your help!

[TerraRoot]

well apart from all that SD does have the best AI and no other game mix's proper car physics and keys (GT1 and 2 don't count since their obsolete console games) so the graphics are only a minor problem

[mungewell]

You're definately right that I'm no OpenGL expert, and really don't have the time to dig into the rendering code too deeply... what we need is an experienced person to jump on board and make suggestions on how SD3.0 can further improve wrt the 3D engine.

> therefore i'm not sure if the graphics engine is the main bottleneck here

It might not be the engine, but just how we're using it. That said there are recognised problems with it... such as the lens flare textures.

Simon.

[mungewell]

and also.... we know that the 'rear view mirror' is a real FPS killer (does a render, then copy to texture, then texture paint) so should not be used when testing. I did suss out how to directly render a mirrored view (see F2 camera list), so this should be technique should be used for the rear view mirror.

For me the largest problem with fps is probably copying the textures across the PCIe bus (as my GFX card is in a 1x slot - the only one I have). Rendering as different screen sizes does not make much difference....
Simon

[W-E-C]

author: scratchmade by W-E-C, driver and wheel-tex from SD-cars
category: Preview
description: Based on Lambo Countach
license: Free Art License

Specs:
Weight: 1040 kg
Max Torque: 520 Nm@5000 rpm
Drivetrain: RWD

comment:
older model with a few fixes
setup is a bit burnout prone

gtc-toro-cat-preview.jpg

[W-E-C]

author: scratchmade by W-E-C, driver from SD-cars
category: MP4
description: based on Formula BMW monoposto car
license: Free Art License

Specs:
Weight: 500 kg
Max Torque: 115 Nm@6500 rpm
Drivetrain: RWD

comment:
when i made the model i thought it's a F3000 car but turned out as a Formula BMW Car
(which actually is more of a MP4,5)

mp4-preview.jpg

edit: xml has a small bug that affects linux users (thanks to TerraRoot for spotting), please use the xml posted by TerraRoot on the following page.

made 2 additonal skins:

mp4-skins1.jpg

[WingCommander]

W-E-C: Perhaps it's time for you to create a package with all your creations!

Awesome work.

OT- I borked my system while trying to compile the new Torcs 1.3.2 Somehow, I'm going to have to try and "back-up" to a point where I can run the game. The Windows version of SD still runs in wine though.