The ylolt material already allows us to create objects that light up when a full course caution is called. I would like to have the same ability for two further kinds of flag signals, namely local yellow flags and blue flags. Using the above functionality I created LED boards (or digiflags, or whatever their official name is) that have now popped up on several F1 tracks. As far as I can tell Singapore was the first but I also noticed them prominently at Melbourne this year. At Fuji I had the experience of the the animated marshals being fairly small even on a 24" screen @1920x1080 and hard to see especially when they're far removed from the racing surface (again, primarily a F1 concern with their wide parking-lot-style runoff zones). For night racing this becomes even more of an issue as the marshals will be all but invisible, with the LED boards providing a functional improvement to our racing. Here is a photo of the comparatively small digiflags at Singapore to illustrate: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fox2mike/2872789775/ And one from Melbourne:
Some time ago some dev said that rF2 will use some scripting language. I hoped that such animations will be available just thanks to this feature rather than making use of predefined materials.
I don't much care if it's enabled through pre-set animation triggers like the texture maps are or through some scripting language (that would have to be tied to a animation one way or another), I'd just like to see it implemented. Texture maps seems like the easiest way since it already exists for full course cautions and is performance friendly.
I believe you don't care. But unfortunately current approach is weak which is proven by how it works (or don't work to be more precise). If realized by predefined materials, it must be just designed in that way. From time to time, it will result of lack of things you want to do (ie your flags). If done by scripting, all environment attributes and event will be (should be) exposed to scripting engine and available for modder. This way you may utilize it or not, assign your materials or animate them depending on environment changes. For example you may put out red flag in case of water flooding track too much, without additional involvement of ISI. Good example is Arma2, for which, thanx to internal scripting engine, modders have developed FM radios which takes terrain shape and distances between emitters/receivers into account. Not because game devs have prepared such feature, but because attributes of whole environment are available for modders. I know that my posts will not help you, and are not even answer on your question. I just put some words to show some possible improvements instead to staying with current solutions. We should ask ISI for improvements.
Yes, give us full control over every aspect of the engine through a "scripting" interface. I'm sure that'll be just as quick as adding one more set of predefined texture animation maps.
