rec.autos.simulators

:>"If you see what - *ack* those French blokes - have been able to do in
:>MotoRacer with Direct3D, it's obviously the way to go"

:I think MotoRacer is great, just bought the full version this weekend,
:*but* I don't think it's a great tester of the merits of D3D.

Very true, because Moto Racer is using only Direct3D 3.0 IM, while
there already is a superior Direct3D 5.0 available. Try for instance
G-Police demo (a D3D 5.0 game), very pretty and moves very nicely.

:It's a "walled" driver, just like Need For Speed. It isn't acutally
:doing much rendering. It ought to be fast.

I don't know how being a "walled driver" has anything to do with the
amount of rendering the game has to do.

:My point is, that there is just too wide a performance disparity in
:the D3D titles right now. Are MotoRacer and Mercs the "exceptions to
:the rule", the best and worst we'll see? Dunno... Who can say?

Irrelevant, since both games are using the _older_ Direct3D.

:It also remains to be seen if the DX5 D3D performance increase
:(Draw Primitive, or whatever) will be for real.

Judging by the comments from the game developers so far, this
appears to be the case.

:In my experience, the D3D games are allowing me to run at the same
:frame rate with nicer graphics, while the direct ports have both the
:nice graphics and a 50% increase in speed.

I thought the issue was "OpenGL vs. Direct3D", not "native vs. Direct3D"?
Naturally native support is faster than either Direct3D or OpenGL,
but it has its own drawbacks, like that it won't run on any other
cards besides the one it is ported to.

For instance, if you now have a Verite V1000 card, and replace it
with another 3D card which is not 100% compatible with V1000
(I heard even V2200 is not), you can pretty much kiss goodbye
to your 3D accelerated Nascar 2, ICR 2 etc. Most probably this
wouldn't be the case if those games were using either OpenGL
or Direct3D, even though there have been some compatibility/driver
issues with both APIs.

:Framerate is very important in driving sims, and I've only seen D3D
:deliver the goods once in about 6 games, and in that one case, it
:wasn't a very demanding game.

G-Police demo does look pretty nice. ;-)

Have you played the full version? If you do big jumps on a lot of the
tracks, you'll see that there is nothing outside the track.
What you're seeing for much of the track is a couple of textures
repeated over and over.

Really? I feel it's very relevant, since these two games are available
now. DX5 is still unproven.
The one DX5 game I've heard about is a demo, and it's been pulled at
the request of the manufacturer.

I didn't really know there was an issue, but I think the thread
started out with a guy asking why NASCAR2 didn't have 3DFX support.
I was just responding to the guy that suggested D3D for racing sims.
I think a D3D (with 3.x) NASCAR 2 would be dog slow.

Hopefully the demo will be re-released. It didn't say why it was
pulled.

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Have you looked closely at the Papy products? Try driving down to the
keyhole at Mid-Ohio in ICR2. Drive around it onto the backstraight and
look back across toward the pits - wow, where did the ground go?!?

Does that detract from the game? Not at all, in fact Moto-Racer is one
of the smoothest and fastest 3D games around. If repeating a couple of
testures is a clever way to gain frame-rate and can be done without
looking "samey" then I see no problem with it.

Well, D3D support in Moto-Racer is pretty nice actually. I doubt it
would be "dog slow" if it was done correctly.

Cheers!
John

Of all the D3D games I've played, MotoRacer is the only one that
impressed me. Flying Corps is good, but it has a lot of pauses while
it does the texture swaps.
Mercenaries is plain awful. It looks great, but it turns into a slide
show during fire-fights.
They're all giant too. Do you know why?
The Native Voodoo and Rendition patches fit on a single floppy.
The Mercs and Flying Corps patches are between 5 and 8 meg ZIPPED.
Pretty klunky.
I hope games that use DX5 are as fast as claimed. It'd be nice to be
able to have one standard so that old stuff would keep running on new,
faster cards.

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