[TuxKart-devel] track building

[Joel D. <jo...@ya...>]

Hello.. I saw the gotm mention of tuxkart (a little
late, I guess) and wanted to try and contribute. I'm a
programmer but I want to get a little more practice
doing level design and level building so I was
thinking of trying to build a "halloween" themed track
(before halloween).

I had some questions, first a political one: Is there
any objections to using non-free software to create
content as long as the content is given to the tuxkart
project? There aren't any legal issues, but people
might have concerns about the open-source purity of
the project, and I'd respect that. All of the links
and tutorials mention only open source tools. (I'll
contibute any exporters I write in the process). If
people have a problem with the use of proprietary
tools, I'll find another way to contribute.

Next, some technical questions:
- How does the engine handle visibility? Should I
break the track into chunks that the engine can cull,
or will it do that when it loads? How big should each
chunk be for the engine to be happy?
- instancing?
- does the ac3d format support per-vertex color (aka
prelight?)
- texture budget? And is the 256 res. limit still in
effect now that no one uses voodoo cards?
- how does the engine decide what to use for
collision? can we mark geometry to not-collide? what
about collision-only geometry? should I just use
regular geometry with a 100% transparent map?

I'm sure I'll have more questions once I start
modeling, and I can always dig through the code to
answer them, but I thought I'd ask the experts, and
introduce myself.

Thanks!
Joel