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Faith Hill (singer of "There you'll be", "Pearl Harbor" song)

Thanks!  Do let me know of any issues or if something is not comfortable. I still want to add a few things, like online groups, car information and some more powerful handling of groups and garages from inside the interface.

2-sided triangles can be drawn anyway, but it's a waste of CPU. Having 1-sided triangles helps in sorting when using a Painter's Algorithm. I think even if the machine can handle it, it's bad practice to use 2-sided for PA when it's not needed. For Z-buffer, of course, this doesn't matter much. I would like to implement Z-buffer myself. I had also thought of dynamic material shading. This is, that the same material will look a little brighter or darker depending on the orientation of the car. This would look great, but I have to do some good tests with vector products and I'm feeling too lazy for that.

For the whole track, it's more work to do the reverse-rendering. Most of what you have to do is just placing the objects in the grid, but some track elements do get transformed.

Do you do the actual Z-buffer and then just tell SDL to draw the result or does SDL do the Z-buffer?  Right now, I think I'd concentrate more on solving the physics problem, then maybe I can try to improve the graphics. For rendering, I have a little problem with near clipping. It becomes more clear when rendering a race from inside the car.

Wow!  I didn't know about this Renault 12. It looks beautiful!

These two cars I mentioned, together with the Citroën Ami 8, were the ones we had in the family when I was a kid.

Has anyone noticed that Romania rhymes with Trackmania?

Yes, I was able to compile your program. It was the viewer that I saw I had to compile and didn't have the energies to do that, ha, ha.

But yes, I've been looking at the models in Stunts previously many times and they are not very "diplomatic". What I mean is, one would normally make a rendering engine with its quirks, but would try to make sure it can render mostly everything that's well-behaved in the expected manner. At the same time, whoever designs the models would try to make them well-behaved, so that the special quirks of whatever rendering engine will not bring their personality up to view. Instead, only what the renderer has in common with every other renderer will be seen.

This is not the case with Stunts. Models exploit the engine quirks with complete impunity. So then, when you try to render them with something else, you're bound to see some differences. There's a flag for rendering bias. It clearly serves that purpose, but it's not clear how. Many triangles are unnecessarily 2-sided. Line segments are used sometimes directly attached to walls (like inside tunnels or at the Joe's sign), which is problematic because they can't be 1-sided, as they have no "normal", so it's impossible to sort them against the background surface. So it's either guess how the original engine handles these quirks and do exactly the same or simply recreate some models to avoid this. The only thing I've seen that Stunts models do well is I've never seen a concave polygon in any of the built-in models. Great, because it's not clear how they should be rendered to look the same as they would in Stunts.

Renault 12... Citroën 2cv furgonette 

  I didn't know of so much scandal!  Corruption is everywhere. It's a shame

From a quick look, I think you have red and blue swapped, but not 100% sure. In defmat.txt, there are also indications of some "textures" that exist in Stunts. Most materials are just a solid colour, but some are semi-transparent. I've downloaded the viewer, but still haven't figured out how to compile it. Not used to SDL. But yes, for now, I'd say try that.

Centre of the Earth

Defmat.txt I created based on our wiki page for shape materials. Maybe you'll find it useful:

https://wiki.stunts.hu/wiki/Shape_materials

If it's images, you could post them here, or else, you can write to me at xlucas@mailo.com.
I think I'll soon upload my new garage program to R4K and casrepo.org

Talk (the band's called "Talk-talk")

[2024-02-10 Update]

2024-02-10 Update

This is the first version that could be considered "complete", although I do want to add some more things. In this release, I have finally added car image generation.

Things to notice

• When you browse any list, Pretty Garage will check the icons subdirectory for cachéd car images. If an image is found there, it'll use it
• If no cachéd image exists and you're browsing Stunts or a garage, the program will try to generate an image from the shape file, which should be uncompressed. If so, it'll add the image to the caché
• If the car shape is compressed and you have configured a target directory for stunpack, Pretty Garage will try to use it to uncompress the shape and then generate a caché image
• If you want to force image regeneration, you can delete the caché images from icons
• The program will always use the first paintjob (for now)

Let me know if you guys notice any bug other than wheels always facing front

Well, currently, Pretty Garage does support configuring any command line unzipping program that can take a zip file name and a target directory

That's interesting work!  I have to take a closer look. It's incredible how I can more or less read your language even though I've never learnt any of it. Our languages are closer than I could've guessed!

Stressed is a program a community member made some years ago to edit Stunts data files. "Stressed" stands for Stunts Resources Editor. It allows for reading and saving uncompressed chunk-based files of the format Stunts uses, which includes 3D shape files, but there are many more. The thing is Stunts often provides these files compressed, so a companion program was made by the same author to decompress these files, then the main program uses it to read the files that are compressed. This little program is called Stunpack.

This week of work has left me super tired. I think I will be going to bed very soon

Here I'm posting a little program I made that will output all the contents of a 3sh file as text. You can thus read a custom car. If you want to read the original Stunts shapes, whether cars or track elements, you need to first unpack the P3S file into a 3SH file. This you can do with the stunpack tool that's part of the Stressed project. I don't remember where the repo was. Sure somebody can point us.

Anyway, to me, it's a lot more complicated to parse a text file than to pull a binary stream, but it can be convenient if you just want to see what's inside.

It looks like I will have to overcome my laziness one day and sit to understand these physics. Game physics can be divided into collision and kinemantics. Not sure if this library does both, but my thinking is that the hardest part is collision, yet it's the part that's more similar between games, whereas kinematics can change wildly.