Re: [Supertuxkart-devel] Support for additional path

[<coz...@gm...>]

Hi list,

> > I would rather like it if the artists followed the current directory
> > structure, and they just specify their base directory; otherwise, they
> I obviously wouldn't agree with this :)

But didn't you meant this when you wrote "or if the artist should
follow the .../{data,models,images} directory structure (which would be less
implementation work ... I think)." ?


> > probably will need to move the files when they are done working on it
> > to follow the directory structure anyways,
> Well, I think at a start we have to move the files when we get a new track.And

What do you mean? when we get a new track, just adding the files
should be fine, we don't have to move anything?


> once we have a downloadable packages and/or a download manager, I think
> we should actually move to having all data for tracks (and karts) in separate
> sudirectories (perhaps a few shared textures).

Okay, but if the directory structure is going to be changed, I would
rather do it now and get over with it, and stick to it.

Are the only objectives of this change is to make things easier for
artists and for downloadable packages? thought I don't know how we
could change it so it helps with the downloadable packages.


Another detail, that I don't know if I have mentioned before: the
downloadable packages feature should come with a flag to disable it at
compile time, since for distros, it won't make  sense since the
distro's package manager won't be able to follow the updates.


>We can't put the textures in one directory (name clash)

If there is name clash right now, we can just rename the textures, and
thinking of good names for new textures isn't that hard. While I think
it could be a good idea to separate the track's textures from the
kart's textures, I want to keep all of the track's textures in one
directory, to help track designers get into the mindset that all the
textures can be shared between tracks, thought there might be a few
exceptions to keep some tracks more unique.


> Most tracks have one model (except the old ones, and we all agree that this
> should be fixed anyway), some data files, and perhaps a dozen textures.
> I don't think that this would be messy - quite the opposite: all files
> for one track are in one place.

Yeah, the old tracks should be fixed, by having proper tools that
allow us to handle tracks with multiple models, not by joining all the
models together; consider the beach track, which has a bunch of palms
that were originally a copy of the same model: if you just load the
palm once, not only you save memory, but can increase speed if the
palm is put inside a display list.

Maybe the .track, .drvl, .drvr and .loc files will be merged in the
future. About textures, I already wrote that I want track makers to
think of them as shared, but more to the reasons of this, it's not
just memory/space savings but to have as little texture switching as
possible, since it's one of the most expensive OpenGL operations there
is.


> Additionally, isn't it easier to use blender if you don't have to set
> the texture path? IIRC . is the default, so the textures will always be found.

Not exactly. Right now, because of that, texture names for tracks(or
karts, I don't remember which one of the two) have to be changed. What
I mean is that textures for tracks are "../images/<name of texture>"
while textures for karts is just "<name of texture>", so there isn't
even consistency in the path to the textures now with the models.


> *grin* Wasn't it you who recommended me to either copy the textures or start
> in the texture subdirecory so that the textures would be found?

Yeah, that's how I handle it, but it's more of a quick fix since I'm
don't want to fix texture stuff at the moment.


> >  The only
> > situation where I think it *could* be easier for them, is when they
> > are not used yet to our structure(which I think that is just a minor
> But that would be nearly all of the new artists  :))
> We should make it especially easy for new people, so that they don't
> get discouraged early on.

I just think that people who won't overcome something such as
directory structure (since I consider that a minor annoyance) probably
won't get very far with track/kart modeling XD



> If we switch to a different opengl lib later, we might actually get a similar
> system for free (I know that irrlicht does).

I'm not a an of Irrlicht for STK, mostly because it has a bunch of
stuff inside that we don't need.


> > Why can't the new content be placed in a directory under
> < supertuxkart/media/tracks/<name of track> ? You could always just
> > checkout that specific folder, not the whole media package; I want to
> > avoid increasing complexity.
> Besides my known arguments against the current media package: that's actually

We all know the media package is a mess right now, but what it's need
is a cleanup, not to be thrown away :) I'll see if I talk to Grumbel
to see if he wants to do it, or I'll do it myself.

-Coz