Month: March 2009

CTDP pointing south

Enzojz pointed me to CTDP’s Google Trend statistics.

The first graph is nothing special, a graph of the last year, witzh a big peak in December when we released the CTDP06 mod. However, I wonder what the news-peak in April/May was,

The second graph is more interesting. It beginns in 2005 and covers the complete time since CTDP relaunched its websites. The first peak in November 2005 was the release of CTDP05 for F1Challenge. The following three month without data result from a bad redirection on the website I think. Otherwise I couldn’t explain it. In April 2006 I fixed this and we released the expansion pack for 05 and Bahrain for rFactor in May. The big peak in August 2005 was the release of the 2005 mof for rFactor. Since then CTDP is in steady decline and even the release of CTDP06 last december will seemingly not stop us from dieing. We are so doomed! 😀

I take this with a grain of salt, still certainly intersting. I always like to know, which countries  has the most racers. 🙂

Doing their homework …

Working on old F1 seasons sometimes brings interesting details to the surface. We are close to finishing the Pacfic-car. Today, Marco learned, that Pacific never finished any GP in 1994. Mediocre and tried to identify a few track-versions and came to the conclusion, that the team had a pitstop during the Monaco race just to change a few logos on the sidepod.The track-versions for Simtek will be a horror, because there have been logo changes on every GP. We haven’t deciphered everything yet, so I can’t say if we decide to limit it to a few crucial changes. Let’s not get carried away here. 🙂

Update: one day later

During research I found this museums-car. There are 2 persons here, who didn’t do their homework: The one who claims this is a Williams and the one who thought that painting a 1992(?) Benetton with the 1995 colors (in a bad way) would be enough to sell it as the champions-car.

McLaren polished

When I wrote the Making-Of for Toro Rosso I already had a second text in mind for the McLaren. However time constraints pushed it back several times. Also I was waiting for somebody to actually ask for it. I ended up sending Mediocre to send somebody to ask, to keep the illusion. I prepared the text anyway. 🙂

This is about the chrome-effect of McLaren.

Continue reading McLaren polished

Patch 1.1 Progress part 2

Good afternoon,

Some you may be wondering what is it with the patch, moving arms and what else , when when and when 🙂  Probably you know us well enough by now, that it is done when it’s done, but I’ll give you a little update.

The patch has been in testing  now in the last week(s) or so.  We’ve also had some feedback from top leagues such as FSR since the initial release, such that we have been able to tweak the physics. This has been mainly in the hands of our Physics Guru Michael Borda (aka speed12) , who probably had to endure most of the stresses for this patch,  but ultimately we are limited in resources, and we have no intention of releasing it without feeling the job is done.  Nevertheless,  the iron is getting hot, and the time drawing nearer , so completion looks more likely by the day.

The cars wont feel very different from the base release, it is mostly minor tweaks, but the tyres have had quite a significant overhaul with better heating and tyre wear.   So now you really got to test those componds every race and decide which one works best for you over a stint. 

In addition, the tyre slip curves have been improved with increased resolution, to provide a more precise TC response, this means that both for the non-TC and TC drivers,  this gives a better feeling to the driving experience, however, it has alse been received with some mixed feelings, hence, the TC system is currently being tweaked, and hopefully finalised today. Your previous setups for V1.0 will probably need revising, personally I have found this to be the case.

On the multiplayer side of things,  I have been working on making a compact version of the dedicated server version.  An idea I had some time ago that dedicated servers don’t need to  nearly as big as the actual mod itself, this will make an interesting story that I’ll write about some other day.  However, while this idea is true, it didn’t come witout some issues in testing, which hopefully have now been resolved.  Currently, the uncompressed version of the dedicated server is around 70 Mb, around 10 times smaller than the compressed version of the installer for the V1.0  dedicated server release.  After encrpytion this server size will increase by 20% or so, but still, the dedicated server installation would be less than 100 MB uncompressed.  It is however still in the hands of a few testers, to see if this  idea holds ground in all scenarios, before we can definitely promise this compact version, but we hope so, and it is looking more likely by the day.

This kind of server installation is useless as a client, you simply wont see any cars in the showroom if you tried, it is for the dedicated server only and nothing else.

As said before the moving arms will also be released,  we only need an installer for it, but it will not be on the same day and will not be part of the main installation, but as promised, shortly after.

That’s about it from the CTDP world and patch V1.1.

Thanks for reading 🙂

Chapter B-194 – 4 Years Ago

I elaborated about the general history of the CTDP94 mod in the last long entry. Now let’s take a look at one specific car: Benetton Ford B-194. I liked the Benettons of that time, and since I never painted any car, that has ever won a GP, I actually wanted to take the Championship-car this time. While the mod has quite a troubled history single cars can also have quite an history, which I’d like to show you on this example. Read, why it is not good to work on a project for too long. Continue reading Chapter B-194 – 4 Years Ago

Previously on F1 1994

Imagine you tune into your favorite TV-show and at the beginning they have the recap of previous episodes to give you a head start into the episode. I think it’s about time we do this for the 1994-mod.

It feels like forever that we work on this mod. Actually, our timing is much worse for CTDP94 than it was for CTDP06. We worked on CTDP06 a total of 2,5 years. CTDP94 is in the making since 2003, so for about 6 years. This sounds terrible, it was certainly not the plan, but looking a bit at the history might shed some light on this shocking figure.

Continue reading Previously on F1 1994

And a third time

I got the new mapping for Benetton from Marco and started to update the old texture to the new layout. The changes could have been much worse. On the contrary, Marco adressed my issues brilliantly and it’s much better to work now. Thank you! Here are a few early work-in-progress shots. Marco, I’m sure the final version will meet your expections and your changes will make it a great car! 🙂

ben194v3_1ben194v3_2ben194v3_3