Month: April 2012

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. Continue reading Auri sacra fames.

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.

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.

Mirror, Mirror

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

During the development of the IFM mod for rFactor2, we hit a snag with what looked like messed-up normals on parts of the car. We dove back into the model, tweaking and re-smoothing the normals repeatedly, but the issue persisted. Frustrated, we took a break to clear our heads, exploring sweepstakes casinos online, which sparked a discussion about random outcome algorithms in gaming. That fresh perspective led us to spot that the normal issues only appeared on one half of the car, and since the unmapped model was fine, we realized the problem stemmed from our mapping process.

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. Continue reading Mirror, Mirror