Deciphering the past: Simtek 1994

As you know, we are currently busy with the IFM project. However, that doesn’t mean F1 94 is out of our heads.

The F1 1994 project involves a lot of investigation and research, mainly on sponsors because high quality photos are rare to non-existent. A lot of guesswork is needed and often a little luck. During our research, we often stumble upon little anecdotes we like to share with you guys. For example, we talked about the various small logos on the Minardi that were quite hard to find.

One particular sponsor on the Simtek has been following us for over two years now. It’s been on the rear wing endplates only at the Pacific Grand Prix; we had numerous photos but none of them were good enough to decipher the company behind the logo. We contacted the former driver David Brabham about it and he couldn’t help us in this case. We even mentioned it in a devblog article and posted it on numerous forums but no one was able to help us.

Until last week.

The guys at F1 Rejects love everything that is bad, funny, mysterious or embarassing in the world of Formula One and one of the members contacted a Japanese friend of his about the matter – two years after we posted the request! And he came up with an incredible result: what we thought could be Eastside Roccs, Sastiana Pocos, Mastana Pocos etc. turned out to be Marutama Foods. And even better, we were provided with a good photo of the logo.

Well, it’s only a very small part of the mod that none of you guys would even pay attention to – I guess., but for us (especially for me as I’m painting the Simtek), it’s the story we will remember for a long long time I think.

Posted in Anything else, F1 1994, History | 3 Comments »

On this day in May…

… in May 2011, we have been working on the new Ferrari model for the 1994 mod. The first of a series of new models to bring the mod into the modern age.

… on May 1st 2010, we released the first version of rfDynHUD, a plugin for rFactor that allowed to display and customize your own on screen widgets. Today rfDynHUD is open source and can be extended by everyone. Later that month, we also released the first iteration of our DDS Utilities.

… in May 2009 we were in heavy discussions and lay some foundations about a new project, that was going to be the Superleague Formula Game 2009. The hot phase of development was August to October and it was released in late November.

… on May 1st 2009 we released the beta of Bahrain V2 for rFactor. Debs surprised us with this new version a few weeks earlier and gave us his legacy. We released this track as beta, but it was surprisingly bugfree and amazing to drive, so we never released a follow-up. Today we are lucking for talents who help to convert the track to rFactor2.

… in May 2008 we were at full speed to finish the F1-2006 mod. All cars were finished, Safety-Car was just being done and a long ordeal of testing and improving was about to begin. The mod was released in December that year. May was the last month in discussions about a proposed GP2 2007 mod, that never saw the light of day.

… in May 2007, we were working on cars such as RedBull and BMW for the F1-2006 mod. We discussed a Formula Nippon mod, but decided against it.

…on May 1st 2006, with Bahrain V1 for rFactor CTDP released their first featured track and the first CTDP release for rFactor. Meanwhile, first models for the F1-2006 mod were created and the rFactor conversion of the F1-2005 mod was being prepared. This would be the first major F1 mod for rFactor featuring multiple cars, physics in a state-of-the-art quality.

… in May 2005, the F1-2005 mod for F1Challenge was already at full steam. The mod would be released later that year in November 2005 and to this day would be the last F1 season mod to be finished within the same year.

… in May 2004 we have been working on the F1-2004 mod and F1-1998 mod for F1Challenge. Both would be released later that year. Gee, modding was a lot simpler back then.

…in May 2003, after several single car releases, somebody got the idea of creating a full-scale mod of F1-season 2003 for F1-2002, to be released later that year. The modding group TDG folded and members joined us, bringing with them the idea of the F1-1994 mod.

… in May 2002, preperations were done to create and release selected single cars and a 1995 mod for GrandPrix4.

…in May 2001 – CTDP was founded by some German modders with too much time on their hands, who liked F1 cars and decided to release some updates for games such as F1-2002 and GrandPrix4.
While many people came and went, some members in the core have been with the team for all this time and we are grateful to everyone who helped us in our endeavors and who enjoyed our work.

… on May 1st 2012, we present you some new screenshots of the upcoming International Formula Master 2009 mod for rFactor2.

Posted in Anything else, Community, History | 4 Comments »

Auri sacra fames.

CTDP is discussing its financial future at the moment, as we described in an earlier post, I’d like to sum up a few points of the discussions with people in and outside of the team, that may also concern the community and may be of general interest. As I do sometimes, I speak here from my perspective alone and not as team CTDP. Money is not an easy topic in this community, but I think it’s worth talking about.

CTDP has been very stable for the past few years, but even modding has costs, although they may not be as visible as for example running a league or a website. CTDP is not out here for profit, but since modding is increasingly more difficult, so are the expenses. This is an hobby for us, hobby usually are not cost-neutral, but since we take an active part in this community, have our share of impact and truely believe to do a good job in providing you with the means of good simracing entertainment, we’d like to believe our work is worth something to the community – to you.

We frequently discuss this and often the conversation revolves about same basic arguments and facts, I’d like to sum up here. (more…)

Posted in Anything else, Community | 6 Comments »

IFM 2009 : Much more liveries

More pictures! Juluka, AtomAmeise crank it up and work their way on the livery front. Juluka completed work on Fabio Leimer’s car. AtomAmeise worked his way through the liveries of Trident Racing and Cram Competition and also started corresponding helmet liveries.

Posted in Cars, IFM 2009, Textures, Work in Progress | 2 Comments »

IFM 2009 : More liveries

While Andy and erale continue their detail modelling work on the car: such as rims and lods, our painters are busy working on liveries. Due to the normals issue, this work has been on hold for a little while and is back on track now. Dennis ‘mediocre’ Schmidt is working on JD Motorsport.
Meanwhile, we welcome our new member Patrik ‘AtomAmeise’ Bartnik, who also worked on the LMT DTM mods. His first textures for CTDP are the various liveries of Cram Competition and Trident Racing.

Posted in Cars, IFM 2009, Textures, Work in Progress | 1 Comment »

First IFM 2009 ingame shots

You’ve waited long enough, today we’ll show you the first ingame pictures of the IFM 2009 in rFactor 2. The car was already in the game for some time but as we mentioned in the “Mirror, Mirror” post we had to deal with some normal issues first. In the last few days we brought our new tire textures by erale ingame and also replaced the bolts that were previously painted on the liveries with texture planes. The advantage of this solution is a much more detailed texture.

The livery on the car is one of the Jenzer Motorsport cars driven by Pal Varhaug and was painted by juluka.

There is still much work to do but we’re on track. Stay tuned for more ingame pictures in the near future and some making-of tutorials.

Posted in Cars, IFM 2009, Models, Screenshots, Textures | 3 Comments »

Mirror, Mirror

Why there haven't been ingame shots of the IFM model

During the development of the IFM mod for rFactor2 we stumbled upon a problem that looked like some messed up normals on a few places of the car. So we looked again at the car and its normals. Re-smoothened them over and over again and still got this nasty normals on the car. We were clueless what could cause the problem. Then we noticed that those normal issues only appeared on one half of the car and together with the fact, that we didn't have this issue with the unmapped model we came to the conclusion, that something on our mapping has to cause these normals issues.

CTDP maps its cars differently to most or all(?) other modders out there. For the 2006 mod there were three textures: one for the top of the car, one for the right and one for the left side of the car. Right and left had exactly the same mapping which has the following reason: While painting the design of a car you don't have to adjust it for the opposing side of the car. You just copy it over and mirror the sponsor logos and save memory as both drivers share the same textures. Ingame everyhting looks like it should and it saved our painters a lot of time.

We did the same style we used for 2006 with 1994. Just for IFM we experimented with a slightly different approach. We now have 2 instead of 3 textures for the car. Left and right aren't seperated textures anymore. They're both distributed over these 2 textures. But still one side is mirrored for easier painting so that our painters just have to move their design up/down and mirror the sponsor logos.

Posted in Cars, Community, F1 1994, IFM 2009, Models, rFactor2, Tutorial | 6 Comments »

IFM 2009 : Revised helmet model

Today we want to present you the helmet model of our IFM 2009 mod. It was originally created by Eugenio Faria and was part of our F1 2006 Mod as well as the F1 2007 BMW F1 car we created for ISI as an add on for rFactor 1.

So this helmet has quite a history. Back then in 2006/2007 it was top notch quality. But for our current project we revised the model to bring it up to our current quality standards. The result can be seen below. We will post another blogpost with an interactive comparison as soon as (CTDP)Dahie is back from his well deserved holiday.

Posted in IFM 2009 | 1 Comment »

IFM 2009 : First liveries

In this blogpost we will show you some progress we made on the liveries. James and Dennis did a great job on the Jenzer and JD designs. As the liveries aren’t exactly the same like in Formula One most teams share at least a basic design. They also had to recreate most sponsor logos from hand as in IFM a lot of rather unknown companies were involved.

Also most of 3D work is finished. We’re currently making some minor tweaks here and there and are working on the LOD objects. So stay tuned for more IFM news in the near future.

Posted in IFM 2009 | 8 Comments »

Williams 1994 model WIP

As promised, today, we present another new model for the F1-1994 mod. Radu Teo continued his work on the 1994 Williams and created many new previews of the nearly finished model. Infact he overdid it and the model is even a bit too detailed and we will see if he gets an angry letter or how we incorporate his details. Enjoy!

Posted in Cars, F1 1994, Models, Work in Progress | 4 Comments »