Author: (CTDP)Dahie
Textures supervisor, Webdesign, Programming
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.
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! 🙂
Recreation
A little bit of recreation:
Aren’t we all excited about the new season? 😀
Sometimes on the Cebit in Hannover …
In Germany is currently the Cebit, the biggest annual computer and trading fair in the country. Timo, one of our beta testers was visiting the fair this weekend and just had to take a few pictures of the race simulator Toyota was offering. Especially the car looked strangely familar.
What surprises us the most is, that they are still using the 2005 model, guess the 2006 mod sucks.
Der Grund
I’ve been in the team for 6 years now and I’ve been part in as many mod releases. For me the procedure is not new and even though, when I manage the task-lists, it looks like so much work and I often wonder how all of this actually gets done in the short time between closing time and falling into the bed exhaustedly. I usually have the honorsof introducing new people to the team, I like to know who I’m working with, so I like this a lot. I explain our way of work, our infrastructure, who pretends to be the boss and how we work on the cars.
Actually, the latter is something more hard to explain, because if you haven’t actually done a completely release-cycle, you only get to hear strange terms and abbreviations and you barely get them in order. To get the picture, I made a sequence diagram (software engineering stuck :D). This shows the development steps for the model and for the related texture.
Numb3rs
I should be working, but I’m procrastinating the half day already, so I continue.
Today we got the 55th league asking for the token. I had no idea, the league scene would be so big and diverse. Gotta say, if we had known, we may have thought of another solution for the token distribution. I didn’t hear alot of questions or complains about its use, but the work involved for us, always copy-pasting the mail and responding is underestimated. 😀 Still we are very happy about the interest, I hope everyone has a great time driving the mod. 🙂
I asked Gonzo for some more statistics. Even if I tried, I couldn’t really figure out how many times the mod has been downloaded. All I know, I seeded 31 copies, in other terams 29 GiB. So while thereal numbers can only be guess work, Gonzo has the numbers from his server, which hosted the mod and had a traffic of 3242.23 GB for all december. This equals in 2400 complete downloads on this server alone and not counting torrent seeding.
So much for dry numbers. How about you, how many laps have you coverd in the mod? How long do you drive usually? Any guesses? 🙂
Music, the great recipee for taking a break from all your troubles
Ok first the real news: Soundtrack of CTDP 2006 is released
Lars did all the music in the mod and put them all in a cool netrelease. We didn’t include all of them in the release of the mod, more will be included with the path 1.1. So if you want to hear them all here. I really like, that he put it under Creative Commons-license, so feel free to remix. 😉
On other news. Well there is not much.
Of course, right before the release of CTDP06 and the imidiate weeks afterwards had alot to talk and write about. In January for many of us real life kicked back in, for me in way of exam weeks and now my Bachelor thesis. Alex has been working alot on the patch. I’m not sure how much there is to do yet, obviously it will need some testing before it gets released. Looking at the changelog, it’ll deserve the term “patch” 🙂
Marco, Mediocre work on 1994, but you know, since they posted here before. Andy while taking a small detour from modding formula-cars and working on a fantasy touring-car project and on the new Bahrain-version. There our biggest bottleneck is the lack of more trackmodders. Our call for help with the AIW wasn’t really successfull, so work is a bit slow. Another bottleneck being, that we lack a good helmet-modeller. Our helmets for 1994 need more attention and while Marco is doing his best, somebody who knows what he is doing would be very helpfull right now.
So much for today, I go back to catching up with work and life and listen to some music.
Oblique cars in multiplayer
This is about an issue that has been reported several times in very many occasions. We’d like to take the time now and talk about the problem. It has been reported, that sometimes during online races the cars begin to drive oblique. This looks very strange and obviously neither good, nore realistic.
© Maranellofan
The issue, that cars begin to lean to one side during online gaming is known, but unfortunately, that’s not an issue we are responsible for, but a bug or rather a shortcoming of rFactor.
You see our mod has one of the most advanced physics ever developed for rFactor. Our physics-guys went into great length, to use every option available to simulate the driving as realistic as possible. We are at a point, where we touch the limits and unfortunately this tilting is one sign of rFactor giving up on us.
Basically it is caused by 3 factors:
- the damper settings. We have the option to either use unrealistic values to workaround a graphic-bug, or keep the realistic physics and accept the bug, which is only caused sporadically. We chose the latter.
- the setup: It’s not really clear how, but the setup has some influence on the problem, but it doesn’t cause it.
- the track: The modelling-detail of the track-mesh influences how precisely rFactor can calculate the correct position of the car-model on the track. On tracks with low surface detail, low face count and large faces, the scanning looses precision and can also cause this bug.
Obviously, we are not happy about this either, we were in contact with ISI, but obviously they won’t fix it untill a possible successor of rFactor. We also can’t do the track-modelers/-converters job, to deliver good tracks, who don’t cause problems. Also, as far as we know, we are not the only modding team having this issue.
So you have the option: either accept the bug or check for damper-settings in the physics files, play with the values and find a change, which avoids the bug, but still gives you tolerable driving.
Maintance
On friday January 16th at 8pm gmt, our host will move the servers to a new location. So we expect a downtime between 20pm to 3am. So don’t be surprised or worried when our website can’t be reached at this time. Also, don’t evenget the idea we’d be down because of another release. Infact, the site survived the release in december surprisingly well. 😉