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The smoothing plays an important role, even on purposely bumpy tracks.

http//wiki.vdrift.net/ImageTrack-smoothing.png

A visual depiction of track smoothing. Imagine this image is showing the track surface from a side view. The black lines represent the track mesh, and the red lines represent the bezier patches. Once the track has been traced in the track editor, VDrift will use the red lines to do collision instead of the black lines. On the top, this represents a dip in the road. You can see how collision using the red line will behave properly. On the bottom, this represents a bump road. You can see that the red line doesn't change the magnitude of the bumps, it just makes them realistically smooth instead of unrealistically pointy.

joevenzon Wrote:The smoothing plays an important role, even on purposely bumpy tracks.

http://wiki.vdrift.net/Image:Track-smoothing.png

A visual depiction of track smoothing.

i agree with this, but the way the smoothing is done right now, the smoothed track is too far from the real track (look at the picture i posted of the car sinking at nurburgring). maybe that's what needs to be adjusted.

--alex--

I totally agree, I definitely implemented the 3/4 segment width road thing incorrectly in the track editor.

Kind of a tangent, but have you ever heard of or used Bob's track builder?
http://www.bobstrackbuilder.net/

It sure looks cool. I was going to have a look at the files it outputs to see if I could write a converter to VDrift. The only thing I don't like about it is it costs money, so in my mind it's more of a modeling tool than a proper track editor.

I was also thinking more about rewriting the track editor with a normal GUI toolkit. Any thoughts about improvements in the general workflow?

joevenzon Wrote:Kind of a tangent, but have you ever heard of or used Bob's track builder?
http://www.bobstrackbuilder.net/

i used 3DSimEd to convert the tracks. it also costs money. bob's track builder sounds very interesting but i never actually played with it.

joevenzon Wrote:I was also thinking more about rewriting the track editor with a normal GUI toolkit. Any thoughts about improvements in the general workflow?

i would like to have the ability to hide/show individual objects, highlight all the objects that have a special material assigned to them, search for objects and center the viewpoint on them. i haven't played with a track in a while but i'm sure i can come up with a lot more things.

--alex--

i've been trying to modify the track editor to highlight objects if they are collide-able but without any success yet. joe, can you give me a pointer? thanks.

--alex--

I added this in a simple way in R83, you can probably tweak it from here to get what you want.

thanks joe, this is perfect. makes it so much easier to work on a track.

--alex--