Author: (CTDP)Dahie

Textures supervisor, Webdesign, Programming

IFM-2009 status report

A little status report to get you up to speed.

Since our open letter, we got a new designer, we welcome Neil to the team, who immediately began work on the helmets.
And helmets we need, as we have roughly 1/5th finished and many remain to be done.

For the cars the situation is much better. Dahie has been reviewing all textures and created the export scripts. We find small issues every now and then, collect and fix them. One official team texture hasn’t been finished yet.

The car model itself is done and ready. While shaders may change with future rFactor2 builds, The current look, is quite stable at the moment. Mianiak was working on the driver body (which was based on the shortly released ISI model). We had the first version ingame, but the animation didn’t convince us. The problem was not the animation itself, it was more or less caused by the insufficient rigging/weighting. Somebody within the team pointed out, it would look like the driver has broken wrists. So it didn’t fullfill our expectations and we changed plans. For the initial release we will go for a non animated driver. We will create our complete own driver model including rigging. But this may take a little bit longer. That’s why we’re using the non animated version as place holder.

Pier and Erale are working on the physics. Next to the official car manual erale already had, we got some more specs from Tatuus – the car manufacturer – helping us with some of the missing data. Grip levels, aerodynamics, suspensions are some of the usual suspects, they are trying to figure out at the moment. On a positive node, the car doesn’t spontaneously jump into the air anymore.
We recently started larger physics tests to see, how the mod handles in multiplayer and to get more feedback from users.

Outside of the mod preparations for release began. Note, the release is still a bit away, but preparations are a good way to see what’s missing and can be done easily in parallel. What’s done is done.
As we do with all our mods, we are going release templates for the IFM-2009 and with a high probably before the actual Mod-release. Dahie is working on these, the documentation and a special treat, we won’t reveal just yet.

Regarding the release, we have one big feature missing, which is rather important for a release: Sounds.
We don’t have a sound specialist at the moment and right now we’d be stuck with reusing ISI’s sounds from any of their rF2-mods released so far. We feel this wouldn’t do the mod justice, so we invite people interested and skilled in sound design to help us recreate the real feeling.

That’s it for today.

History: 15 years of car painting

I’ve been car painting for almost 14 years now. I started with GP2, joined the active community with GP3 and met with CTDP along the way. In addition to the last post about the changing times in the Modding community, I’d like to visualize that in my field of car painting and take you on a small history trip through the years.

A little glossary at the beginning. The surface of a car is not just defined by one graphic, but by multiple maps with different properties which – defined by the material – influence the look of the surface. The regular color texture is also called diffuse map. Height-differences are encoded in the normal-map (bumpmap, if the map is only greyscale). The Reflection map defines how reflective a surface is and the Specular map how much direct light is reflected. Occlusion maps can be described as the shadow applied to a car.
Continue reading History: 15 years of car painting

TGMutils library published

With rFactor2 comes a new and complicated tire model. While it supports many new features it’s also a lot more complicated than in rFactor1. Together with erale, we had the idea of creating a tool to edit the tire definitions (TGM-files) more easily. We started a prototype, got many new ideas and the proof-of-concept worked, but due to my time constraints I didn’t continue development. However, since this is a topic where smart utilities to help modders can be developed and are welcomed, I decided to give you a head-start by releasing parts of my prototype.

I published the TGMutils to CTDP’s GitHub. This small library is a TGM parser to read the rFactor2 tgm files and store the data in a Java class. This library can be integrated in your software to import TGM files. This only covers TGM import, TGM export is not implemented. The parser is fully tested using jUnit. At this point this library could be interesting for Java-developers, but not users. I licensed it under at MIT License. So you can use it in your projects, fork it, extend it and make something of it. I’d be very happy. 🙂

Getting started to … package a rFactor2-Mod

Next in our series of tutorials for Modding is the topic of packaging for rFactor2. The Packaging is a new feature of rFactor enabling modders to deliver Mods as complete closed packages, that enforce untempered multiplayer racing. The packaging topic is still very much debated in Modding circles and we figured the available tutorials are not a good point to start. So Stefan Triefellner sat down to summarize his experience.
This tutorial is a how-to mainly aimed for car mods! It does not cover the topics of updating an existing mod. We will write another tutorial on this topic later.

This tutorial was written for rFactor2 build 60-90, newer builds may behave different and have different processes. Continue reading Getting started to … package a rFactor2-Mod

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 looking 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.

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 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.

Continue reading Mirror, Mirror