Month: December 2008

xerry m.mas

Right untill the last minute we worked on some stuff.Alex is working on bugfixes for a patch of F1 2006, that will be released next year. Speed is refining some of the physics settings, nothing major (I hope 8)). Andy works on one of our tracks and makes good progress as well. I did some work on the track-artworks in the last few days, actually debs did some amazing stuff for Bahrain and I have to learn see and learn how he did it for Monaco. And no, it’s still far away, but it’ just nicer to test with some proper artworks. 🙂

Others are already lazy bums and enjoy their vacation, so will we the next few days. This month was great, but exhausting and so everybody will appreciate a few days off. 🙂

Have a great christmas, have some nice racing, preferable with sleds and snow.

League physics requests

I have been sending out the league-physics-token in the past 2 weeks. I got more than 35 requests and I got a few things I’d like to ask for:

  • Please don’t write more than one mail. I can’t check every name and every address if I already send it, if you are already in the list or if you are new.
  • Please don’t hurry! I am a busy man and it may take 1-3 days to respond. So hurrying, won’t get you faster.
  • Talking to other members of CTDP may get you a file, but at the end it will be confusing, because I can’t check who already got the token, who mailed for it.

I caught up with all requests so far. Please mail me again, if I haven’t responded to yet.

Thanks for your attention!

Conversions & CD-checks

Shaun (Whata) released Imola 2006 several days ago on rfactorCentral.com. As you may know this track is a conversion, so he had his doubts if he was allowed to publish it. After talking to rfC-Admins several times he got the ok IF he would add a cd-check to the setup so that only owners of SimBin-games which included the original imola-track can install this conversion for rFactor. So he came to me and after some time he convinced me to do the setup-part.

Finally it worked as it was supposed to and he released the track. But it didn’t take much time until some people wrote comments that the cd-checks are stupid and that they would be forced to buy a Simbin-game for using the track for rFactor. STOP! Forced to do? I want to make one point clear: if someone does not have one of the games, he cannot have the track for rFactor. Nobody is forced to do anything!

The idea came up to add a similia check to our patch 1.1 so that only people with rF 1.255F without a crack can install the mod. We thought about that and we are not sure if that would make sense, I want to give you our pro & contras

Pro:

  • we would make it harder for people using a cracked rF to play our mod
  • we would make sure that people have the latest rF-version (1.255F)

Contra:

  • it is not our job to deal with piracy
  • if would force the user to have a clean rF-installation (some people use cracks to avoid cd changes)
  • maybe the user wants to run CTDP 2006 on a different version 1.255F
  • maybe the user wants to install it into a temp-folder and copy it by hand to see what gets changed

So I would like to hear your oppionions about that. As this could be called “copy protection” somehow I want to ask that you focus on the topic and don’t start a general discussion about copy protection-software.

Templates & Viewer release

Ok, took a few days, but I finally finished work on the templates. This involved 3 parts:

  • The templates itself is an archive with all psd-templates for all cars (all teams + SA06 and Safetycar).
  • The viewer, which is the ISI gMotor Viewer from the SDK. We included Scene-Files for our cars, so you can preview your textures in the actual game engine.
  • Documentation about the templates and the viewer.

I order you to paint, I want to see great cars! 🙂

Picking up 1994

Now that F1 2006 is over, we are organising the next mod(s). F1 1994 has been in the tube for ages and will now get the attention it deserves. Marco has been working on if for over a year now and has made good progress reworking many shapes and painting the basic textures. These textures are outlines for the final textures in lower resolution, with missing details and now shading. The final textures beginn now and will be in 2048×2048 resolution and full baked rendershadows as we did in F1-2006. I’m painting Benetton, Mediocre will make his first steps on the Pacific and Mike is working on Ferrari. Both are new to the team and are welcomed. 🙂

Marco continue to work on new improved suspensions for several teams and is currently mapping the Ligier.

Shaun started some work on the helmets, although we have to finish the models first. He will get help by Ste and comback-guy Rob.

Raül returns with some first amazing renders of the current williams. It should be noted this is the current texture, but not the final one, so there will be improvements in the next months to come.

Identical physics for leagues

Ok, speaking with Michael revealed, he actually changed the league physics before the release from near-equal-physics, I talked about it, to complete identical physics. The cars also have the same wheel-base, which results in the cars floating slightly, this is an inconvience, but one you’ll have to live with. I’ll write to the leagues today, who have been waiting impatiently so far.

CTDP Preview Race on PSRTV

PSRTV would like to apologize to anyone that experienced technical difficulties during the CTDP preview race this past weekend. One of our service providers experienced a serious issue on Saturday that disrupted connectivity during the event. To prevent outages like this from disrupting service in the future we have implemented an improved redundancy system this week. In addition, the ProSimRacing.com website which saw heavy traffic during the event has been updated to handle additional load. Thank you for your continued support.

For anyone that missed the event live you can watch the broadcast replay at www.psrtv.com.

Congratulations to CTDP on another outstanding F1 mod!

Sincerely,
PSRTV Dev Team
ProSimRacing.com

Note: PSRTV scales bandwidth for broadcast events based on need. The issue afflicting Saturday’s race was due to an unrelated incident, which has since been resolved.