Disclaimer: I know the sim is far from being finished and I'm not
complaining about anything. Yet, I think the good gals and guys at
Papyrus made the AVI available to us (in part) to collect our
impressions and comments. I won't disappoint them. :)
Let me first mention the features that fall in the "strictly awesome"
category:
- The grass texture is beautiful. Looks like my lawn in winter. ;)
- The fire and smoke effect is nicely done, too. If you look closely,
you can even see single flames. The smoke dissipates very
realistically.
- The 3D model of the car in flight is astounding, especially the way
the suspension reacts to the several impacts
The damage model is not yet implemented, obviously. I imagine it will
be very difficult to independently calculate the trajectories of the
different components in three dimensions. Judging from Papy's earlier
sims, I expect that all wheels and the engine, plus maybe some
miscellaneous debris, will be "separable" in the final version. If
those parts travel through the air (instead of skidding on a plane as
in ICR2), they will eat up a lot of calculating power. If I may
anticipate a thread from the fall of '98: "GPL - slide show during
crashes!" ;)
Now to the things that made me wonder:
- In the "real world", the car probably would have penetrated the
fence, or have flown across it. As it seems, the fence is a descendant
of the walls in ICR2 - the end of the world. Of course, there has to
be a limit where the simulated world ends. I would prefer if the walls
of the "holodeck" were a bit further in the distance, however.
- What exactly is burning? As the car rolls through the air, the fire
is always *behind* the car, blocked from our view. It seems to come
from a spot connected to center of the car, but traveling through
space half a meter behind the car.
Again, I'm *not* complaining. I'm offering feed-back. :)
Comments?
--
Wolfgang Preiss \ E-mail copies of replies to this posting are welcome.
wopr"at"stud.uni-sb.de \ There is no "2" in my real e-mail address.
Uni des Saarlands \ Sorry for the inconvenience. You know why.
(snip)
If those parts travel through the air (instead of skidding on a plane as
in ICR2), they will eat up a lot of calculating power
(unsnip)
I for one would be quite happy just to see the car doing exactly what
it's currently doing in the pre-alpha AVI.
I don't need to see bits of car and/or driver flying around to know that
he is out of the race. :-)
(snip)
As it seems, the fence is a descendant of the walls in ICR2
(unsnip)
I think you mean 'antecedent' or 'ancestor'.
Whatever...if the fence were made from Armco then the car would have
either stopped, penetrated it or been launched.....so anything is
possible.
--
Bruce
(at work)
"Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get
tired."
(Jules Renard)
I think it world be sort of cool though, if you were driving down
a long straight at Monza. You can see the next car fairly far off
down the straight, it crashes! (smoke, ***, steel, fire and Lord
knows what else fly everywhere!), you say "Whoo-hoo! free position!".
If damage resulted from hitting debres from the accident, that would
be great too!
John
