Hi everybody!
I just found out this thread and is great to see such nice feedback for this incredible piece of software despite it steals me a lot of sleeping hours
I must say that I'm very much in line with R Soul ideas who is providing an excellent feedback IMO.
Many of the things that need to be improved have already been suggested. I would like just to synthesize some them and add my own ideas to several topics.
-
Conversion to newest sim titles
This is basically linked to quality. The graphical capabilities of latest sims are one step ahead of the ones already covered. Apart from the pure format export, these require
several new techniques that in some cases are out of the possibilities of the program (face billboarding, new shaders, texture mapping, ...). Having to use a secondary software to deal with those can be a solution for conversions between different sim formats. However, when dealing with an evolving project within BTB, it is a pain in the butt.
- Track editing and terrain
Merging tracks and dealing with texture blending is really annoying right now. The quality of the solution is usually very poor in comparison with what we can see today in original rF2 and AC tracks. This needs to be seriously rethought in order to be functional. Many ideas and problems have been raised but this issue needs to be carefully solved.
IMO one of the most interesting concepts is the possibility to convert a track into terrain. Also when grass is created, the possibility to use the track direction as the mapping spline should be included. Open roads should be able to add grass in the extremes. The way the first panel is attached to the road is terrible. It should be always be attached to the edge and not alternate appearance between assigning materials and editing nodes! The create from side and join should be applicable of course to track edges.
- Object and material managing.
Objects should be listed, renameable and categorized. Default names should use xpackname +index. Possibility to create merge groupd for merging objects when export
Same for materials. Material shaders should be updated (real road, real grass,
- Others
Face-billboard support for trees would be great.
Animations would be nice.
Directly importing other objects without creating an xpack (by updating it) would be very nice. Pretty much handled like when loading a texture. I would maintain xpack structure though to edit the default characteristics of each object and material.
I think that the fast line spline calculation should be improved.
HDR editing and real rendering utility would be awesome
Multiple layout support.
Thanks
