I got the rest of the new cars into the game, and I'm very happy with the way it's starting to look. I'm having 10 more made bringing the final number close to 30.



There was one crash bug in the game that was pretty nasty...I tracked it to the 3rd party physics library I'm using (Newton, www.physicsengine.com )...there's nothing I can really do about it, I've contacted the maker of Newton and I hope to work with him to fix
it once I get done with the IGF deadline.



The fix seems to be disabling the physics for the street side objects in the city. Because I have 10,000s of objects/vehicles/actors in the city I have two options:

- Create all objects at startup, and enable/disable them using the internal Newton function calls. which is pretty slow and has some considerable memory overhead.

or

- Create the objects in realtime as the enter/leave a certain radius of the camera, this is the approach I use. It allows me to have an unlimited number of physical objects in the game, there aren't any speed problems since I'll need to remove/add 2-5 objects each frame, it's pretty fast. I keep a copy of the last known physics matrix as the object leaves the camera's radius.

My theory is that I'm deleting an object and Newton is still referencing it...I sent an e-mail to the creater of Newton and he says this isn't likely, but so far I havn't experienced the crash since I disabled creating of street side city objects, I really hope it stays stable. And I hope we can work out this bug.

I'm making progress on every other aspect of the game as well.

- Dan