Re: [TuxKart-devel] Handling of tracks

[Paul B. <pb...@sb...>]

FWIW Department:

I'd like to see levels.dat go away.  The Track directories should be 
dynamically parsed. And even if someone screws up and gives themes and tracks 
the same name, the parser should not choke, but display all themes/tracks it 
finds.  How it gets displayed in the menus is another matter. Here we just 
want to populate a structure with all the theme/track information needed by 
the game engine and UI.

There should be NO sharing of textures or models between themes. They should 
be standalone entities.  Any common items like karts, players, herrings and 
effects are assumed to be elsewhere. Of course it might be nice to have 
themeable overrides for the herrings and maybe other common elements. 
(Hmmmmm)

Maybe a nice recursive method could be used to populate the theme/track info 
structures.

The names of directory's should not be significant to the parser.  In fact the 
whole hierarchy should be case insensitive. The parser should be indifferent 
to DOS/UNIX line endings. (I think the current .loc parser tuxkart/plib 
already handles this)

Within each THEME directory there should be ONE .nfo file: There should be a 
.loc file for each track within a that theme directory.  The .drv will also 
be at this level. Subdirectories for models, textures, and audio exist to 
organize the common componets of the theme.

The parser must be robust should not choke if it does not find any directories 
or files. Errors for missing items should be sent to stderr or whatever 
method plib supports for OMG messages are mandatory to make developers lives 
easier.

The track/theme directory hierarchy could go something like this: 
( where <...> are directories and [...] are files and # set off comments.)

<Players_root>

<Theme_root>  
	<Theme_dir_1>
		[theme.nfo] : Theme Name, Theme Background image?, Theme Music?
			#PARSE ME for Theme info
			#Theme info - Maybe the menu system could change the background and
			#theme music as the player scrolls through the available themes/tracks
			#Would probably require some code to make the transition between images
			#and music smooth. Obviously these ideas are currently outside of the
			#agreed upon enhancements for the current revision.  Perhaps in the
			#future..

		[track_a.drv] : Drive file

		[track_a.loc] : Location file - Track Name, Track Music, Herrings, etc...
			#PARSE ME for track info

		[track_b.drv]
		[track_b.loc]
		...
		<models> : models, animations...
			[track_a.ac]
			[track_b.ac]
			[widget.ac]
			[widget.bones]
			...
		<textures>
			[texture.rgb]...

		<sources> : storage for theme development files...
			#Possibly not distributed with binary distributions?

			[something.blend]...
			[bricks.xcf]...

		<audio>
			[blam.wav]... :Theme specific sound files...
			[rockon.mod]...

	<Theme_dir_2>
	...
	<Theme_dir_n>

Gosh it's late and I've rambled on too long here.  Hope someone can make sense 
of this. Improve it, reprove, dicuss...

G'nite.

Pb - Tuxkart Lurker

Flames invited!

On Sunday 25 July 2004 04:27 pm, Pascal Giard wrote:
> Hi there guys,
>
>   i'm trying to get to understand more about why tuxkart currently loads
> tracks this way in order to add support for
> ~/tuxkart/tracks/{*.{loc,drv,ac},levels.dat} (like listed at
> http://netpanzer.berlios.de/tuxkart/index.php/Tasks).
>
> Firstly, that perhaps only Steve can answer:
> i'm wondering what is the purpose of the constant MAX_TRACKS ?
> can't we just look for a \0 or ' ' in levels.dat ?
>
> I'm also seeking for ideas in order to cleanly support two tracks
> directories. I know some ugly ways to implement it, but would definitly
> appreciate to find/learn-about better solutions.
>
> -Pascal
> --
> Projet MoviXMaker (http://sv.gnu.org/projects/movixmaker)
> Projet [e]MoviX[2] (http://movix.sf.net)
> Debian Project (http://www.debian.org)
> TuxKart (Wiki (GOTM): http://netpanzer.berlios.de/tuxkart/index.php)
>
>
>
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