By Team SimRacingWorld
16 February 2003

Graphics

Lots of little bits and pieces this month and unfortunately some of them not graphic related but I have managed to get some more done on the Lotus 49B. I have the cockpit in and almost done.

Here is a view similar to the one in the last update. As ever please ignore the flipped texture :O)

And here is a larger version of one of the images from the last update.

The designing of the logo was bought about from the need to start thinking about the GUI (graphic user interface) for Racing Legends and you cannot do that until you are happy with the way it is gong to appear.

Chris is about to do more work on the GUI so it was important to get a style finalised, well nearly finalised, there is more work yet to be done on it.

I think the following few weeks will see me working more on the presentation of Racing Legends than on anything else but I do hope to finish modeling the Lotus.

A couple of shots of the right rear upright, brake and wheel assembly. The left shot shows how it will appear at rest and the right image is at speed. There will be a number of graphics to represent degrees of motion blur and these will fade between each other to get smooth transitions. You may also notice that all parts that spin have these motion blurred textures.

Coding

As ever a brief synopsis of what is happening on the coding side of Racing Legends as there jobs are a lot more involved and complicated and unfortunately do not always result in anything that can be seen but yet is absolutely vital.

Gregor is still hard at it. He has been working on the constraint system and improving his solvers apparently :O) He is also experimenting with some new ideas for the tyre model.

Chris, apart from the GUI as I have mentioned has been converting a lot of the code over to work as DLL's. This will allow us much more flexibility and will make updating Racing Legends a lot easier. Whilst he has been doing this he has taken the opportunity to document a lot of the code. As we plan to make the engine available at some time for people to create their own add-ons it needs to be very well documented to make it as easy as possible. We are creating an SDK for Racing Legends and Chris has been busy preparing his code for this end.