Month: June 2010

Enough already :)

Seriously, we never got so much feedback on a call-for-help. We had 8 people contacting us and we are currently welcoming everyone to the team, introduce them to our infrastructure and hand out the work. We were really surprised by this number and have to work to give everyone their work packages. This will be a new wave and hopefully we have a lot to show you in the next couple of months.

At the same time as I’d like to say thanks to those who responded to our call, I’d like to quit the call-for-help now. CTDP is always looking for new members, even when we don’t say it out loud. Having so many new faces at once is very nice, but also a challenge. I don’t want to discourage anyone from contacting us, but we can’t handle more people right now. Instead I’d like to say, contact us in a couple of weeks when the dust has settled and we can say where we are at again.

Thank you for the responses,

PS: I wonder if such a call also works for track texture artists…

Head protection

We are overwhelmed! Alot more people responded to our call for help on the 1994 mod than I anticipated. Many talented and interesting people who want to know what to do next. AndreasT and I are doing extra shifts to review cars and have enough cars ready to assign.

As if he’d know we’d be posting this Call-for-modelers, David Alby Medina contacted us in the week before. He was interested in modeling for the team to improve his portfolio. After short talks, he agreed to provide the helmet we have been looking for almost 2 years.

The story story about the 1994 helmet was another one of the long ones. For the 2006 mod we had the awesome helmet model by Eugenio Faria, unfortunately he wasn’t available anymore to help us create a new helmet for 1994. Marco started a helmet, but quit half way through it. Afborro succumbed to our begging at the beginning of the year, but was cut short due to his commitment with Reiza. We were looking for external helmets, but none from that time period met our expectations. Now thanks to DAM, we have our helmet and he a great piece for his portfolio once it is finished.

This is the the helmet of Ayrton Senna, of who we happen to have the most and best reference pictures. There will be 2 more common variants of the helmet for other drivers.

Now with the helmet done, our helmet painters can finally start to work their way through the drivers list.

Dossier 1994: progress & problems

It was pretty quiet in the last few weeks. We were working on the Ligier and we’re facing a new challenge. That is we need more hands than we have right now.

So CTDP in general has a problem. While we developed our workflow over the years, we found ways to cope with the big amount of work in our mods and to organize this work. The mods can not be done without good organization.
Still all our infrastructure doesn’t help us with the issue the team is currently facing.

Considering the size of our mods and that CTDP is a project done only in free time, it often surprises people that we only have a core team of less than 10 people. 2 Modeler, 3-4 painters and 2 physics guys, 1-2 programmers and a beta tester. Many of them have been in the team for more than 5 years or even from the beginning. Additionally we used to have many people who join the team to help and we have sort-of freelancers, who help, but didn’t join. No problem, there is space for everyone. This is how CTDP has always worked in the past 9 years.

Working on projects like ours often takes a long time. Modding has become very professional and for several members it has been there head start into business. Keeping the motivation is very important and so is finding new members.
The work on the 2006 mod was a drag for many people and we were happy when we finished it back in late 2008. Unfortunately working on new projects – 1994 and 2009 – did not bring alot of new energy as we had hoped.

Right now we are in the situation that we need new blood. We are working hard on 1994, but we need new manpower to help with the work, we need more hands. The mod will not have the same amount of content as the 2006, but it is a challenge for other reasons. The lack of good reference material requires us to perform very thorough car reviews and these reviews leave more work, than Andy alone can handle.

Who do we need? First and foremost we need dedicated and motivated people who are interested in season 1994. We need new modelers in Maya and/or 3D Studio Max, not necessarily with knowledge about rFactor-export, but sure it would not hurt. We need people who know TYPOlight/Contao and want to help with our websites. We need Java-Programmers who want to help with the continued development of the DDS-Utils and rfDynHUD. We need people who can continue work and don’t start everything from scratch. We need people who communicate (team language is English) and are critical towards their work and the work of their teammates. We need people who are willing to help and are disciplined to finish their work. And if one or more conditions describe you, then WE NEED YOU!

Nevertheless on the brighter side, there were also progress in the last few weeks. As I said above we worked on Ligier. 6e66o was so kind to take the car out for a ride in Montreal and made some shots. Thanks for that! The helmet shape is still temporary but one of our new members, David Alby Medina already started to work on a proper replacement 🙂

Update of the ChampionShipManager NX

Today we released an update for our small championship editing tool called ChampionShipManager NX. There is nothing really new, main focus was to fix bugs and improve the usability. The complete change log can be found in the readme file (available in English, French, German & Spanish). Follow this way to the download page.