> No, that's why dust, reflections, shadows... etc are a waste of frames and
> effort.

Not really, the game is CPU limited, if you have a modern GPU card then it 
will be sat there almost idle during this game.  Effects like reflections, 
shadows, dust etc add virtually zero load to the CPU.  In fact, the fan even 
turns off after a few minutes on my GPU when I play this game, that's 
unheard of in any other 3D game I have.

> 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).

Yes, but the game is CPU limited, so any further taxation on the physics 
engine (which is run on the CPU) will slow down the frame-rate.  I suspect 
he wanted to allow this game to be played by the widest possible audience. 
Even on a dual-core 2.4 GHz machine it goes jerky (<20fps I assume) when 3 
objects are interacting.  I imagine he wanted single vehicles or at least 2 
vehicles interacting to be playable on "average" machines.

Of course an option for "road detail level" would be perfect - but I guess 
we just have to wait and see, it's only one guy developing it don't forget.

> 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.

I guess he didn't care so much about the visual mesh quality, and just used 
the physics mesh as a basis for drawing triangles.

>> 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.

You must be joking, right?  Which other games do you know feature a 
non-rigid-body model of vehicles and run in real time?  In which other games 
can you see the physically correct bending of a crane truss when you are 
lifting something?  In which other driving game can you wobble your car by 
steering when it's on its side?  Which other flight sim has a non-rigid wing 
and fuselage model?

The physics of this game are causing a stir in the community, I really hope 
that some of the big game developers are taking note and will use models 
like this in future games soon.

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