Author: (CTDP)Dahie

Textures supervisor, Webdesign, Programming

Templates & Viewer release

Ok, took a few days, but I finally finished work on the templates. This involved 3 parts:

  • The templates itself is an archive with all psd-templates for all cars (all teams + SA06 and Safetycar).
  • The viewer, which is the ISI gMotor Viewer from the SDK. We included Scene-Files for our cars, so you can preview your textures in the actual game engine.
  • Documentation about the templates and the viewer.

I order you to paint, I want to see great cars! 🙂

Picking up 1994

Now that F1 2006 is over, we are organising the next mod(s). F1 1994 has been in the tube for ages and will now get the attention it deserves. Marco has been working on if for over a year now and has made good progress reworking many shapes and painting the basic textures. These textures are outlines for the final textures in lower resolution, with missing details and now shading. The final textures beginn now and will be in 2048×2048 resolution and full baked rendershadows as we did in F1-2006. I’m painting Benetton, Mediocre will make his first steps on the Pacific and Mike is working on Ferrari. Both are new to the team and are welcomed. 🙂

Marco continue to work on new improved suspensions for several teams and is currently mapping the Ligier.

Shaun started some work on the helmets, although we have to finish the models first. He will get help by Ste and comback-guy Rob.

Raül returns with some first amazing renders of the current williams. It should be noted this is the current texture, but not the final one, so there will be improvements in the next months to come.

Identical physics for leagues

Ok, speaking with Michael revealed, he actually changed the league physics before the release from near-equal-physics, I talked about it, to complete identical physics. The cars also have the same wheel-base, which results in the cars floating slightly, this is an inconvience, but one you’ll have to live with. I’ll write to the leagues today, who have been waiting impatiently so far.

Supported track

The mod doesn’t include any tracks, but the mod supports many tracks. This is used for the upgrades, which change automatically to the according upgrades.

Some reported “missing tracks”. Missing is relative, because we can’t know all tracknames that exist out there, so we already called twice to get lists of tracks, we should support and we do so know. This trackname will be added in the next version of the mod, which will be the last chance to add new tracks.

Call for Kittens

Take a deep breath, Dahie, calm down, bite your tongue, break a pencil, do anything, but don’t let it out on the email-writer. *conscious breathing*

I’m working through the emails we got during the last days, many leagues, many nice words, a few repeating bug reports. (I’m impressed how many use the DX8 mode! :))

And so I got another few mails with people apologising for their English. I’d like to try a new method, which originally was used to stop people from smoking: Everytime I get a mail of somebody apologising, I’m going to to kill a kitten. I like kittens, but I’m allergic, so you see what self-sacrafice I’m willing to take by killing one each time I read this annoying PS-BS! I’m a patient guy, I can laugh at dumb mails and hate comments, I like to handle the emails, because I like to read what everyone has to say, but this really gets me nuclear (nucular)! Everytime I read it, I have to swallow and something inside dies! I don’t know if I can make the world a better place, but if I could stop everyone from apologising for speaking or breathing, I think I would have succeeded! Self-deprecation is fun, devotion can be as well, but apologising for your language skills is neither! One day, if I rob a Walmart, I will be sorry for my english. Untill then, please quit it, do me this favour, this single favour for the guy on the mail-counter and don’t have him to kill the kittens. Please! … Because I don’t have any …

What about the templates?

I read just a few people asking for templates. Well to those few, templates will come. Most are pretty ready,but they where done before the betatesting so they need to get some of the bugfixes.I’ll work on it during the week to get them out as soon as possible. They have been on my personal todo list long enough. Just so you know, we didn’t forget them.

Beta testing and the left-overs

How do I start this. I had some software engineering courses, which also covered the topic of beta testing. Actually 5 people testing the software really deeply are supposed to be enough to find 90% of the bugs. Adding more people to this will increase the chances of finding more bugs insignificantly. We had lots of testers, which in my opinion did a good job. Some were very verbose about bugs and although we may have sounded annoyed sometimes, we were glad about every issue reported and we always encouraged that.

But still, the situation was tough: 3 game modes, 6 possible gen-files, 11 teams, 17 gp configs for upgrades and skins and many more variations. There is no good approach to this amount of permutations. We played with the thought to do organised check-list testing for everything, which resulted in a 33-sheet spreadsheet, which was unhandy to use. So we trusted, that so many people with so many testers, most bugs are found.

In my opinion this worked and even though there are a few slips that are reported, so far nothing serious was found. We got emails with feedback and with some technical advise (yes, we also learn new things every now and then!), which we are thankful for.

Everything is collected in our bugtracker and will be reviewed in the next couple of days. I can’t tell yet when there will be a patch, since nothing serious is to fix, we don’t have to rush.

Still we welcome and value your feedback!

Release review #1

So, the website slowly calms down and regains their usual speed. We enjoyed the first day without this monkey on our back. I don’t know who in the team kept his intention of not browsing any forums for at least a week. I didn’t, I read every comment I could find and have to say a big thank you! The big majority of comments is really nice, we appreciate every single one! Alot of questions where asked in the last 36 hours and even though we tried to read up, there is no way to answer them all imidiately. I hope to cover some topics during the week here in the devblog. (Bugs, Templates…).

Today I’d like to start with the release itself. We are getting the first statistics and we have to say one thing. We knew the stress on the servers, on the mirrors would be huge, I thought I planed it accordingly, but actually the load was alot heavier. Shortly before the release, we had a last talk in the team and we were convinced, that 11 mirrors would be fine and could handle it. If 11 is not enough, what is? Well, they got maxex out. Some hit their traffic-limit. Some where taken down by their provider, because of too many connections. This is why, I always stressed, that this is no childs-play release.

Still, I want to say thank you to any of our mirrors. I doesn’t matter how long you survived, you helped to handle the release and we appreciate the sacrifices you may have, rebooting now. CTDP doesn’t have an own dedicated download server. We rely on external server to download our mods. I am always overwhelmed, when people offer us downloadspace! I did two calls for server this year and within hours people contacted me per mail and offered to help. Thank you! These people allowed us to give you free, fast, ad-free downloads. For as long as they could anyway. 🙂

Moving on, the torrent runs perfect. Sascha gave me the statistics of the initial torrent-file and  sp far the overal traffic is roughly 2000 downloads. Adding to this are between 5000-6000 downloads on the HTTP-server downloaded from our webpage. I haven’t gotten statistics from rFactorCentral yet. Calculate each download with 1Gb, and you see what stress we put on this Interweb. 🙂

I don’t wish to break things. Alot things did break. The live stream at PSRTV.  rFactorCentral, which was down sunday morning and had to turn off their mod rating. Our mirrors. Obviously we didn’t plan this mayhem, and not only us underestimated the response to the release. Still, having the power to crash the internet or influence it in such a way presents a kind of power which feels satisfying and good also makes us a bit proud after such a long work. You guys are maniacs and we love to mod for you, if this is your response. 🙂