"Tom Austin" <taustin> wrote in message news:4718b274$1@news.povray.org...
> somebody wrote:
> > "scott" <sco### [at] laptopcom> wrote

> >> http://rigsofrods.blogspot.com/

> >> It's made by a guy by himself, so don't expect the interface to be
> > amazing,
> >> but once you remember the basic controls it's great fun.  If he tidied
it
> > up
> >> a bit and added some missions to it then I could see it doing really
well.

> > Interesting. However, the mesh quality is atrocious. I don't understand
why
> > developers bother with things like particle systems, shadows or
reflections
> > when the extremely low poly-count will more than negate all such
attempts at
> > "realism".

> I think you missed the point of rigsofrods.

Not at all. I'm not pitting mesh quality against physics engine. Physics
engine is interesting.

> It's realism isn't in a photo realistic graphical display.

No, that's why dust, reflections, shadows... etc are a waste of frames and
effort. Making the meshing more realistic (IRL, roads are not made up of 20m
flat sections) would tax and show the physics better (for any engine, GIGO).
And even for visual realism, it would do more than the former. Today's
hardware is powerful enough to deal with finer geometric detail, but
developers still rely on old texture and post-processing tricks.

> Let us take the game of pong as an example.
>
> One version has fancy paddles that are customizable with your own
> graphic and logos.  They can morph and change into 3 different shapes
> and are even *shiny*.  The ball is round and loses energy on each
> bounce.  The background has funky colors or pictures that are really cool.
>
> The other version is much simpler.  You can choose the solid color of
> you paddle from 1 of 16 colors.  The background is solid in color and
> you can't change it.  But you can design your own paddle shape - almost
> anything you want.  You can also change the shape of the ball - make it
> a square - or even a barbel.  The 'ball' interaction with walls and the
> paddles are now dictated by genuine physics.
>
> The difference is:
> The first game focus was on eye candy (something good in its own right)
> The second game focus was on physical interaction.

RoR would be closer to the first game. I'd rather have the "paddles" have
realistic geometry (smooth terrain, realistic, unboxy, vehicles) than have
bloom effect and whatnot.

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