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The next thing I think I'll dive into is player profiles. Before I start I guess it's best to think about what the profiles will include. I'll lay out my ideas simply and if anyone else has comments they can post what they think.

First off, I think profiles will be managed through a new menu page under Options called Players. The data I think should be associated with the profile:
player's name
game credits ("money")
default car
unlocked tracks
player's web site username (to be used later...)
...other stuff?

Thoughts:
TORCS includes the control configuration as part of the player profile. I always found this confusing. However it would be nice to be able to make controls profiles. What do you think? For that matter should other options be specific to a profile, or should they stay "global" (affect all players)? For instance Joystick Calibration should be global, but different players might want different Joystick Sensitivities...

Some thoughts:

Camera mode -- should this be in the profile?

A record of best times or scores would be nice.

Associating replays with the player would be cool, too.


Also, once you've got an idea of what you want to do and how you want to do it, run the class structure and file formats by me -- I'll provide input. :-)

I was just going to use another configfile formatted file for the profile - one file per player, in ~/.vdrift/profiles/###.profile where ### is the ID# of the profile (ID#s will just start at 0 and increment for every new profile). This way sorting the profiles is easy. Replays and scores will of course be saved here too but the profile itself must come first.

The Camera mode option kind of falls under a "Game Options" menu I've been thinking about adding (we don't have one now). Perhaps the game options should be associated with the player.

As for controls, I've been thinking about this. TORCS makes you set all the controls under the player profile. Why not leave the controls in the menu where they are, and allow the player to create control profiles by saving the current control setup as a profile, or loading another profile.

So the controls would have profiles independent of the player profiles? I think that's the way to go.

Also, why not use the following for the profile files:
~/.vdrift/profiles/###/profile

that way you could later add replays, car tunings, etc under that subdir.