Raven

...is getting old.

But I still want to be able to use it, or something like it, that can set up Racer, preferably with graphics, textures, HDR, bloom, FBO/motion-blur, volume, car, track, screen resolution, AI difficulty... basically anything and everything you can do in racer.ini but in a program rather than a massive text file.

Is it worth trying to contact the maker of Raven, or do we have the necessary knowledge here to make something new?

Your thoughts, please.
 
Your sex is on fire? ..Fifty.. xD

There's quite a few programmers and what not round here, isn't there? It's certainly a much needed program, it's strange that no-one has tried it before...
 
it will b cool to integrate somehow Raven in Racer, to setup all those things in game...is that hard for ruud to make in game those configs?

Probably not, but still far easier just to have everything in racer.ini - plus I'd rather see Ruu'd efforts put into fixing bugs rather than building a menu interface.

Can anyone here actually make a Raven-like program?
 
  • Tiberius

Making a basic shell to add/change things in Racer folders wouldn't be difficult, it's making that into a well thought out organized program like Raven that would take the time/effort. The major problem would be keeping it up to date - Racer's state changes so fast, make something which works in one version and it's totally broken two versions later. I can't even use the config.exe which comes bundled with Racer, because it's outdated already (kills my HDR and motion blur and I have to reinstall Racer if I try to do anything with it). Same with Racer's controller screen, it breaks the assignments for both of my controllers, it's been that way for a while now. I have Raven but only ever use it if I make any of my releases Raven compatible - for everything I just edit files manually or manually copy over textures etc, that's the safest way to do things IMO.

One problem I hit when I was trying to write a basic plugin (see my post in the bugs/problems thread) was that Racer's .ini files don't follow the standard Windows format, so using standard .ini read/write calls doesn't work..or course there's most likely many ways around that, but not for someone with my very basic level of programming knowledge :-/

I still like Racer and I still really think it has the potential to be one of the best racing platforms out there. It used to be really fun, but everything is just such a mess nowadays..the file structure, the documentation is either misleading or virtually non-existent in places, even things like the shaders change seemingly randomly between versions. Other things get implemented and then get abandoned in a half working state. Don't get me wrong, I'm not whining and b****ing, the best things in life are free and all that - but it's probably the honest reason why many people stopped taking the time to create programs like Raven :frown:
 
The major problem would be keeping it up to date - Racer's state changes so fast, make something which works in one version and it's totally broken two versions later.

One problem I hit when I was trying to write a basic plugin (see my post in the bugs/problems thread) was that Racer's .ini files don't follow the standard Windows format, so using standard .ini read/write calls doesn't work..or course there's most likely many ways around that, but not for someone with my very basic level of programming knowledge :-/

This thread is going the same way as many of the other threads.

"This would not be a problem if we had a new FINAL version of Racer"
 
  • Tiberius

This thread is going the same way as many of the other threads.

\\\\\"This would not be a problem if we had a new FINAL version of Racer\\\\\"

Yeah, 090 NEEDS to be the new 'stable' version, with 065 remaining as the last stable version for older hardware - it's probably too much to ask to have 065 bought up to the level of 090, at least including fuel tanks, newer parts of views.ini, increased number of generic models etc. I did try and make a non-cg version of the X-Type, doing non-cg shaders wasn't actually a problem. But there's the limited number of models which means parts of the car don't render, half of the HUD didn't work, it also fired out about 30kb of Qlog errors because 065 couldn't understand parts of the ini files. That's the reason why I said there would be no version for non-cg, I just couldn't make it work without rebuilding pretty much most of the car :(

Like with the people who come along asking why cars/tracks look bad and it turns out they're running 050f. 050 shouldn't still be listed as a stable version, if it remains there it really needs to be made clear that it's ancient and for reference/nostalgia only. Right now the whole thing is as clear as mud.
 
I started writing an application some time ago, but I haven't worked on it for quite some time. I was still at the planning stage (thinking about classes and their connection to each other, all that really fun stuff when developing something ;) ) but also did some quick hacked together code (tried to throw an ini parser together quite literally).

However it was all messy and never worked quite right in the first place. I started doing this in Java, so it would be a cross-platform application. Maybe I'll start on it again, don't know.
 

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