Re: [Torcs-ng-devel] Lights (brake and front)

[Andrew S. <And...@la...>]

Hi Wolf-Dieter,

Great to see you're getting into Torcs-NG now :)  Just one thing
I want to comment on...

> For a fast solution we could do it as described, but for a later state, we
should think about another way. The lights 
> beeing just a circle, independent from the direction of looking to it, are
not nice if used for a car having rectangular 
> lights.
> It works for cars with round lights like car6, clkdtm etc. but for a car2
and others it looks terrible. Making the lights 
> greater don't help.

I totally agree with this problem, and have been thinking of a possible
solution...

Cars could have a seperate model for each "light", which would basically be
a rectangle (or whatever shape the car
modeller chose) placed in front of the light on the car - close, but far
enough away to avoid Z-buffer conflicts.

This new model would not be displayed unless the light was on, at which
point Torcs-NG would draw it.  The new model
would have the texture of the headlight/brakelight but switched on, perhaps
with some transparency allowing for the
light to flare a bit at the edges (whatever looks good).

If a car had the models for these lights defined in the XML it would use
them, else it would fall back to generating the
circular lights itself (and I agree with your changes there btw).

cheers
Andrew