I will be back here in less than an hour.

Looking at you model it seems to me that you are actually mainly using quads. This means if the data would be stored with quads it would be not 320 polies but 160, right?

I personally regard enabling quads is easy way to improve performance.
But opinion way vary here. Some people value triangle stripes higher.

Nether the less, I'll try to keep at 1000 triangles or less. That way if there is a way to convert existing models to quads there will be a huge performance boost :)

Any feedback? Right now I want to know what YOU would want in a racing game. So long as it's not insane like underwater sections or flying :) After all the amiga has always been known for having a strong community, perhaps all that engery can think of fun ideas!

This car looks very good.
A can't wait to see it textured.

I image that a racing game with such nive cars will be a real hit.

One question: Do you need to create details like the rear lights with polygons? Couldn't this all be done with one texture?

It's not the size of the data, but how much processing is needed to draw it.  Most GPUs, and I am assuming Natami's 3D core as well, only draw triangles, even if they are stored as quads until render time.  The advantage of t-strips is that after the first polygon is calculated, each new polygon in the strip only needs one additional vertex to define it.

Also, you can't really store tris as quads after the fact.  Modelers that use quads are designed to keep them planar.  A modeler would have no way of knowing which triangle makes up which quads, and would likely create non-planar quads if asked to "guess".

EXTERNAL LINK 
Can't recommend it enough.  I'd say it's the best free 3D app that isn't blender.

Which program are you using, BTW?

Exactly.
Quads are per pixel, cheaper to draw than Triangles.

Casey Ryan Williams wrote:

Most GPUs, and I am assuming Natami's 3D core as well, only draw triangles,

IMHO for us Quad support makes sense.

If you are saying the engine should be able to automatically split a quad into triangles, then I agree.  Quads are nice to work with, if the modeling tool can maintain planarity.  But, for this reason, I don't think most 3D pipelines deal with quads natively.  I guess it depends on if you using a software engine or Natami's 3D core. 

NO!

I said depending on how your rendering HW works internally rendering a QUAD could be faster and more efficient than rendering two triangles covering the same area.

@Gunnar: Thanks for the kind words! And yeas, I did those lights in polygons to give you something to look at. It's also a useful referance point for making textures. They will be deleted.

@Casey Thanks for the link, I'll look into wings 3D. The program I use is very old (old for windows, anyway), it's called Zanoza Modeler v1.07B or just ZModeler. There are newer versions but Version 1 is Nicer to use to me.

How much performance is gained using quads than triangles?

Also, I  believe the original 3DO's "cels" had the same limitation.

@ Gunnar:  Perhaps it could, though I'm curious why you think it is worth introducing the possibility of non-planar polygons.  You can still model in quads either way.

Mr Copland ;) says: "btw we know that everyone would like a programmable pipeline with shaders etc but it won't be in this version. This is our-first-gpu, no-one on the team has made one before so we're following a slightly accelerated version of the learning curve that the mainstream industry followed.

This version will be fixed-function pipeline, just enough to implement OpenGL ES CL 1.0 and even then we might drop a few bits n' pieces just to get it to work eventually."

(http://www.natami.net/knowledge.php?b=2&note=16454)

If it's not already in the planning, and I would be surprised if it were, what possible advantage makes it important enough to warrant a change in hardware?

It turns out college is canceled today, I don't have anything else to do so it looks like I've gotten more time to work on things today :) It's surprising to learn that other companies made the same mistake sega did.

Rendering a planar quad can be faster than rendering two triangles covering the same area.

 
 

Casey Ryan Williams wrote:

Mr Copland ;) says: "btw we know that everyone would like a programmable pipeline with shaders etc but it won't be in this version. This is our-first-gpu,

 
There is some more info at the end of the thread that you missed.
 
1) Actually this is not 1st 3DAccelerator.
I did my first working 3D accelerator / texture mapper for AMIGA several years ago.
This first version was simple - But it did include support for SW triangles and support for planar quads already.

2) Its correct that our current desing is the 1st GPU for the whole NATAMI team.

FYI that could make a fun fact if proven software can become part of the hardware design in time.

We can chat about this and how cool this design was for it time all day long. But this is not very productive as the old design is not going to be produced, right?

You should focus on the design which gets actually implemented int NATAMI. If you are really keen on contributing to this then I'm happy to talk with you about it.