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Turned out to be more simple than I thought, but needs a lot of polish.

We need to simplify garage track to reduce loading time, maybe even switch to dds textures(need to profile first), make the buttons suck less, maybe half transparent all caps.

Is there interest, should I create a branch?

Yes!

Hello! A very efficient interface was in Need for Speed Underground 2. I'm not saying just copy and paste the thing but the style is great. Just my 2 cents.
But not the rotating podium. The garage pictures is great. Just make the camera pan periodically around the car like a screensaver if it doesn't detect user input for 2 minutes.

Screenshot from the game:
http://img.brothersoft.com/screenshots/s...35930.jpeg

awesome! maybe something abstract like a flat plane (2 tris) with a high res concrete texture and a big black skybox (12 tris). but set so everything is dark except the car in a spotlight.

only reason i modeled some of the neighborhood was in case we'd park other owned cars in the driveway and pan/change views around the selected car. so gut whatever of that track you need to.

The problem are the about 7MB textures that take a few seconds to load. I think if we scale them down to 1-2MB it would load under 1 sec. I'll create a branch soon so that people can play around with it.

Another related idea would be to move resource loading into a thread. To avoid delays when textures are loaded show the models with a default 1 pix placeholder texture. This would greatly speed up car selection.

On the long run the track loader could be adapted to stream objects in view distance this way.

@zimluura
You mean something like this? Just the background not the navigation.
http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/...re-are.png

Also the loading time of this would be pretty fast though the menus should be keyboard friendly and the example I gave before is the most comfortable I have ever used in a game. I played Richard Burns Rally, Live for Speed and other sims, and while the physics were great in these two they lack an elegant interface that can be used without a pointing device.

I've been thinking about switching from SDL_image to openil/devil because the latter supports compressed DDS, 3d textures, and HDR formats. Shame I've been so short on time recently....

@vdriftfan: yeah, something like that could be cool. i think i was working on a track like that at one time.

@joe: i've worked with openil before and found it super easy. i switched to sld_image due to an issue somewhere (long time ago, don't remember what it was). but the only pain the switch was that i was using some openil origin flipping, and sdl_image didn't have that.