Re: [TuxKart-devel] GOTM release?

[Ingo R. <gr...@gm...>]

James Gregory <j....@vi...> writes:

> Well, it's a little less than a week until the originally proposed
> release date for GOTM.
>
> I assume we're extending the target date?

I would suggest another two weeks or something like that.

> Also, if Steve is still refusing to use the Tuxkart Sourceforge
> account to host a download (Steve?) has anyone got any ideas about
> where else it might be hosted?

Finding hosting should be a non-issue, enough free hosting services
around.

> - Grand Prix mode and saving best race times, grumbel seems to be on
> the case with this

Yep, shouldn't be to hard to get it working completly, just needs some
more stuff to gather the times and to display them. Without AI we are
however in serious throuble.

> - FPS issues. Grumbel said he hacked a patch for VBO support into
> TuxKart, are you going to commit it grumbel or is it too buggy?

The 'patch', available at http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/tmp/ssg.zip,
is against plib1.6 and basically replaces ssgVtxTabel and something
else and adds multitexture, multicolor support along with VBO and
maybe some other stuff, I havn't had a closer look at it, but just
copied it over to a recent plib and changed some compile throubles to
get it working. It doubles the performance, but particles and colors
in the character view are kind of broken. Its also against plib1.6 I
think, so it might some additional work to cleanly integrate with
plib1.8.

My OpenGL knowledge is rather limited, so if somebody else could have
a look at it, that might be helpfull. Would be a shame to give up the
factor 2 speed improvement.

> Also, maybe we could reduce the default number of karts in a race to
> perhaps 6? Even with double the FPS the game will still struggle on
> slower computers as it now stands.

Some of the current characters (ie. sushi) are still extremly high
poly, I am currently stretching them all down to 1000 polys, with
probally two LOD levels (500, 200). After that performance should be
more useable. For lower end PCs we could then just switch the default
LOD level down to make the game more playable, using good old fog will
of course help too.

> - sometimes the kart models flick right round, grumbel said this was
> just a rounding error and he could fix this in a few minutes though?

Havn't had looked at it, but I guess its the relaxation code for the
kart position that 'relaxes' a angle of >360 in the wrong direction
than it should, fmod() might help.

> - The tire tracks are sometimes blue? Plus on some tracks they just
> look messy (I'm thinking Star Track/Gown's Bow in particular here),
> maybe it could be a track-defined option as to whether they get
> used?

The tire tracks look broken because they aren't marked as
'transparent', so plib draws them in the wrong order, leading to those
transparency artefacts. Should be easily fixable with a deeper look
into the plib manual.

> - Tire tracks appear even if a kart is currently airborne

Tiretracks are also not aligned to the track and apear on all
steering, instead of only on highspeed + drift situations.

> - Why do karts start off in the air before a race begins? Is it some
> hack to avoid having to work out exactly what height karts have to
> be placed at? Even if it is, it looked silly to begin with, and with
> the new start sequence it looks even sillier

Its a hack that needs fixing, calculating the height of the track is
however not so difficult, it just needs to be done at startup so that
the karts can be placed correctly.

> - The smoke coming out of karts is, apart from anything else, too big,
> it makes the karts look really messy and polluting, when they're
> supposed to look cute and cartoony

smoke needs to be much more transparent, much more random, come from
the right places (ie. exhausts) from the kart and should act
differently when you accelarate (ie. more smoke at startup, then back
to a lower smoke level).

> - maybe all the Race GUI stuff could be converted to use the widget
> set and SDL_ttf, or is this not worth it?

Its worth it, the current RaceGUI font is pretty pixely and ugly.

> - The new tracks don't have track data

Some have, some however have buggy or reversed data, its however
relativly easy to generate, bigger problem is that basically all
tracks suck, since the physics is still not all that good and
fine-tuning tracks without final physics is a bit difficult.

> - the old TuxKart had a bug whereby it often couldn't keep track of laps
> correctly, I guess it's probably still there

Basically the whole track meta-data is still just a list of waypoints,
so the detection is naturally a bit buggy. Might be worth to switch
that to something more descriptive, but that basically goes hand in
hand with the AI.

> - I can see through the head of the new Penny model

Reversed normal, easy to fix on the model.

-- 
WWW:      http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/ 
JabberID: gr...@ja... 
ICQ:      59461927