Re: [TuxKart-devel] Slowness - really related with Karts?

[James G. <j....@vi...>]

On Sun, 2004-09-05 at 23:32, Jason T. Rice wrote:
> Pardon me - I signed on early because the project seemed interesting, 
> but the minute you guys blew off the originator, a guy whose name shows 
> up at the end of 70% of the "OpenGL How To" searches on the Flightgear 
> lists, the Gimp lists and the OpenGL forums, I knew I'd be wasting my time.

We didn't "blow him off", we just fundamentally disagreed about whether
or not adding dependencies was acceptable. Despite this intractable
disagreement we hoped that maybe Steve would be happy to work on the 3D
stuff, which we all accept he knows far better than we do, and which is
totally seperate from dependency issues. He said he didn't want to,
which is his choice, and I don't hold any sort of grudge about this. But
we certainly never said "we don't want you", or "we think we know better
than you about 3D graphics". Quite the opposite, we have said "Steve, we
don't know much about 3D graphics but you do, could you please help
us?".

But I just don't see how OpenGL expertise in any way makes you a better
judge of whether or not adding dependencies is a good idea.

Because you've brought it up again, I'll put the case forward again. No
dependencies are better than dependencies, sure. But given the choice
between a crap GUI and no fullscreen mode, or a nice GUI and fullscreen
mode but with dependencies, or a nice GUI and fullscreen mode and no
dependencies but a couple of months of extra coding, which is best?
There is no right answer, but having a CV with lots of OpenGL stuff on
it doesn't make your answer any more correct.

> So go ahead and flame him.  The single font texture is THE definitive 
> way it is done.  Texture switching WILL kill you on an OpenGL or DirectX 
> system.  If you don't know what it means, Google for "Texture Switching" 
> and I'll bet the experts point to some obscure 10 year old web page of 
> Steve's. That is the reason that every commercial game you pick up has 
> budgetted character textures into compact atlases and you never see a 
> character, feature, deco or terrain piece jump across multiple 
> textures.  EVERY pro title uses a single texture font system to avoid it.

As I said already, the use of ttf for in game text was a matter of what
was easiest, not what is best. At some point I'll experiment to see how
many FPS using ttf loses us. If it's more than maybe 5 fps or something,
then I might change it back to using a bitmap font. If it's less than
perhaps 5 fps, then the question is: another evening of coding or just
leave it for now to focus on other more important things?

> ... and to answer your question, 2 full titles on N64 - a pure OpenGL box.

How does this make opinions on dependencies more valid?

	James