Author: (CTDP)Dahie

Textures supervisor, Webdesign, Programming

(Un)remarkable

Personally I see it this way, on release day everybody wants to have it and have it asap. Everybody means between 350-500 people at any given moment for 2-3 days, who expect to download with at least 300kpbs. On a mod our size, the download takes quite a few moments, so you can calculate what kind of load is put on the download servers. (1.2 TB since monday night!)
We underestimated this in the past and therefore decided a torrent-only release. The release was boring, because it just worked perfectly! No outages, no exploding servers, very few people who are desperately looking for download mirrors to catch the mod. In my opinion the torrent-only release is a big success and we will proceed this way on future mod-releases. We already thought about it for the initial release of CTDP06, but with 11 mirrors we were sure, this couldn’t bring us down. You know the story, we were proven wrong and I couldn’t imagine any release without torrents. This one is a quiet release. We released the files out of the blue and so the tracker took off gently in the night from monday to tuesday. Imagine an announced release, the numbers of concurrent users would be off the scale.

At this point I’d like to thank all of you who were or still are seeding. Everyone keeping his programm open and helping to distribute is part of this release and helped to make it as flawless as it was. Thank you!

However few people have been about quite verbal about their dislike of the fact, that we didn’t add any webservers.
At first let me tell you, that HTTP-mirros will be in place once the storm is over. We are monitoring the statistics and when the speed of the torrent is dropping, we will add the mirros to the download list. In this case you just have to wait. Yep I said it “wait”. I think it is quite arrogant to expect to ask for webservers at this point. For once, they would just break-down under the load anyway and cause trouble for their hosts (I know the last release had at least 2 consequences) and actually costs alot of money!
Secondly, the nice thing about a torrent-release is a fairness-aspect. When you download, you help to spread the file by uploading at the same time. The moment you download via torrent, you become part of the network and you help to improve it. Especially once you start seeding, you are not just downloading for your own personal interest, but you help others to get the mod as quick as you want it to have. I read several reasons why people didn’t want to try torrents. From “I’m too old” to “they spread viruses” I heard the most stupid excuses. Sorry, torrents are a great technology, and we provided a small headstart if you have never used it before. Expecting webserver-mirrors is arrogant, because you only want the download for yourself, you put stress on the server and fight for every bit of bandwidth. The smart one is, who has the patience to wait a few days. I don’t expect everyone to download via torrent, but I think it pathetic to cry about not getting the mod immediately, when they don’t want to fullfill their end of the burgain. How selfish is that?

This is why I ignore requests for other download mirrors. They will be set up later. Until then, happy bittorrenting. 🙂

Update your setups to F1 2006 1.1

With the new patch come several updates to the physics which require changes in your setup. I asked Michael to shed some light on how to approach this changes.

Well, I’m not sure about what setup changes are required entirely. The default setup seems to work okay, obviously performance is not optimized entirely though.
For setups that were optimized, there are a few things you need to change in your setup. Ideal tyre pressures will now be 3-4kpa higher than before. For example, if you were running 109kpa front and 102kpa rear @ Monaco, you should feel comfortable with 112-113kpa front and 105kpa rear. @ Barcelona, maybe optimums were around 120kpa front and 111kpa rear, with the revised physics you’ll be looking around 124kpa front and 114-115kpa rear.
Engine boost maps have changed so you’ll need to run about 6 boost for the race, with boost level 1 for qualifying.
The new traction control allows more slippage but can also cut more engine power than before. This might mean you want to tighten up the rear of the car a little bit more. You may also want to consider changing your “TC upgrade” level.

Some teams like Super Aguri and Toyota have suspension revisions, you’ll probably need to alter suspension setup slightly to compensate for balance issues.

Tyre choices are likely to change and your selections will need to be revised. Operating temperature should still remain key to your tyre choices.

Larger brake ducts increase cooling slightly, you may be able to get away with a slightly lower duct setting, keep in mind you should always try to keep brake temperatures below a peak of 1050C where possible to avoid excessive wear.

Otherwise, physics changes have not been major, so if you were happy with an old setup, it should not be affected too badly.

Waterfall concept

After the 3 days detour for a 1994 mod of a different kind, the work will continue on the actual CTDP94 mod. The status is, that 2 cars are done. Yeah! Done as in, the model and the textures won’t be touched again untill it is ingame. Marco and I are in the process of steadily working through the cars. I check the textures we got from our painters, add noise and dirt, prepare the alterations for the second driver, cleanup and make the look consistent. If necessary I beg Marco to do some last minor changes, but often enough, he finds new things himself.

It could be so easy, if the world was a water fall, we would just work step by step and be done in a months. Modding doesn’t work like this. Does actually anything work like this? Waterfall concept describes, that you work on something step by step and you never go back to a previous step to change something. This doesn’t work for us. It is very annoying to find bugs in the last moment, which would require rework earlier on the texture, remapping or even remodelling. To avoid this, we take this long time to review the material we got and try to make it as right as possible, even if it means to to the third iterations of Benetton.

This was one of the things that caught us on the 2006 mod. Late additions, that required changes to earlier working steps. We learned so much during the creation of the mod, that it was quite a task to keep all cars on the same quality level, which is important for a consistent mod. I think for 1994 we are prepared not to get caught up again. Once the first batch of cars is ingame, we will see. 🙂

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

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