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Howdie,

I have a fair amount of programming experience although admittedly not with DirectX and not with 3D. But there's nothing technically about it that worries me. I have DB Pro and I like it a lot.

I'm working on a car racing game as a starting project in 3D. I'm not worried right now about perfect physics or intelligent opposition, or perfectly simulating the PIT experience, or creating a 16 race world championship season.

I just want to create a Lap Type Track and drive a car around it.
I have a working car with moving wheels and front wheels move in time with the steering. The car accelerates and decelerates, brakes work, everything car related I'm happy with for now.

What I can't get my head around is the track. My thinking is a nice big Matrix with basic Grass Texture and then an Object or objects to represent the sections of track. I've tried drawing a track directly onto the Matrix Texture but I don't like how that looks and looking ahead I suspect making the track an object will be usefull later on.

My problems/questions are as follows:

1. Is the Track as an Objects, overlaid on a Matrix a good approach, or can anyone save me a few days hassle and point me in a different direction. E.g. I've thought about creating a BSP World which would include the Track, Buildings, etc all in one file, but I haven't yet put enough study into BSP's to know if they might be suitable.

2. I can not get ANY Matrix editor to work in such a way that I can load the results into DB Pro. Right now my Matrix is code generated.
I've tried MatEdit and I know there is some fixing required, but I can't get the DB Code it exports to work in DB Pro. I've tried the DB Pro #include files from the Matedit website and still no joy, just errors.

Has anyone had experience for Making MatEdit Matrixes work in DBPro and if so do you have any resources on the major problems. I can post mores specific errors if people feel they can help.

3. Editors like Milkshape seem ok for creating objects like Cars but It doesn't seem to be the way to go if I want to create a complete Race Track. Does anyone know of an Editor that would be suited to the job I'm describing.

4. This is not a problem for right now, but I find Graphics and 3D modelling incredibly boring. I'm a programmer and have been for 20 years, I have no interest whatsoever in slaving over models for hours on end when I could be working on Code. I'm getting a feeling that there are quite a few people out there willing to work on the modelling side of things.

Is there anyone out there who'd be willing to donate a bit of time to putting together a simple Race Track? My policy on games like this is that the Code etc becomes public domain either as a tutorial or a simple download to allow others to more quickly learn.

I see a glut of FPS tutorials and demo's and the DarkBasic creators seem to have a bit of an FPS fetish. But I'm seeing a real shortage of good tutorials for other types of cames especially Driving Games.

Any comments, help etc.???

-MM

download a free 3D modelling app, like deled, learn to use it, and visually make your track on there, it will not be perfect, but its a worth while track, and import it as a .dbo or .x rather than .bsp, for .dbo you would need to download a seperate plugin on the same website.

Personally making a matrix and painting it on is a bit tedius, you will not have all the landscape like abilities with deled as you would with a matrix, but you want a track, so you are cutting your code down really, all you'll need to worry about is collision and other commands to do with racing.

And good luck with this racing game And welcome to the forums

Ive made a race track using the path extrude thingy with blender -

So now i have multiple sections with identical cross sections, the idea being that i could apply one quality texture in the same way to all the parts and have the kerbs, road grass and barriers done at once

My problem is i cant get the texture to work properly. Wings refuses to do it, Blender tutorials are So Completely Useless its unbelieveable. And Truespace 4, which ive had most success with decided to bugger up UV Face projection on a whim half way through. And Ive no idea what to do now. Its not workable to keep learning different programs only to find out they cant do it either. It can obviously be done. Any Ideas?