My one comment, and this isn't directed at you specifically but all games with cars in, would be too much specular.

I've never in my life seen cars which are as shiney as they are in games, it boggles the mind it really does..

Yea...right now the reflectivity is set pretty high but (as I'm sure you know) there are many parameters to the shader that can be tweaked...it's all about what looks best in-game. Right now I'm just playing around with stuff in FX Composer, and trying to finalize the car format.

But I like shiny cars.

They are shiny as f***.

lawl.

It really does look good in motion though, for some reason FRAPS won't pick up FX Composer windows, and the few .avi recorders I grabbed off the net record it @ 12 FPS...bah.

Excellent.

Tone down shiny factor a bunch though, like you said. :)

Remind me: Have you implemented HDR? If so, are the shiny reflections going to be part of that?

If you can't make it good, make it big. If you can't make it big, make it shiny. [lol]

I actually still need to get HDR fully integrated into the game, I did a half-ass implementation as sort of a test, but the loss of MSAA turned me off. I'd rather play the balance game with a bloom effect. Obviously I would have two code paths [the HDR one is just commented out now], but yea the reflections are just part of the skybox that I loaded in FX Composer. I'll probably do a dynamic skybox per-the 5 closest vehicles in-game.

All bets are probably off in terms of looks, once the car actually gets textured. I could probably get away with no HDR at all still. The problem before was that the coloring of the car's texture was getting added to the lighting effects, causing white cars/areas to be washed out. This new shader shouldn't have that problem since I'm actually computing the paint color after the fact.

But yea, gonna do the whole 64-bit or 128-bit pipieline thing next-engine.