(CTDP)Dahie – Page 3 – CTDP Development Blog

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

Williams 1994 model WIP

As promised, today, we present another new model for the F1-1994 mod. Radu Teo continued his work on the 1994 Williams and created many new previews of the nearly finished model. Infact he overdid it and the model is even a bit too detailed and we will see if he gets an angry letter or how we incorporate his details. 8) Enjoy!

Inside F1 1994: Measuring Williams pt2

In continuation to our first post about the new williams model, here are some more overlay shots of the finished Williams model on pictures.

Tomorrow we will post many – absurdly many WIP shots of this Williams model. Stay tuned.

Modern F1

There is a very simple reason, why we don’t do modern F1 mods.

IFM 2009: Before and after…

We introduced you briefly to our International Formula Master mod for rFactor2. As we mentioned the model was originally build in 2009 and we'd like to show you a comparison with of the original model with the one we will use in the mod.
In these shots you can spot the differences between the two models. One of them was made in the year 2009 and features the 2008 spec of the car. The other was overhauled 2012 and features the 2009 spec of the car. The differences in the spec include a pretty big fin on the engine cover, new endplates for the rear wing and brake ducts on the front and rear. Other adjustments were fixing normal issues on the whole car and updating the modeled joint lines on the body to CTDP standards we developed during our F1 1994 modeling.

Alii sementem faciunt, alii metent

Today we want to talk about money. A topic, which is currently also discussed in rFactor2’s forums. We spent a lot of money in all these years developing our mods and providing our website, devblog and forums. So far we handled all expenses ourselves, but to continue funding the required infrastructure for our future developments we’re looking into a few possible solutions to cover our expenses.

Where do we invest the money?

Let’s start with our current situation: at the moment we have a webserver which runs the website, the devblog and our forums. This server accounts for around 120€ a year. Also we have a server running Subversion-Server which is provided by one of our members.
As we had some technical problems with the SVN server lately and maintenance is all in done in our spare time, we decided to look for a different solution.

One idea was to rent a root server and to run the webservices and SVN together on one server only. Given the server is powerful enough another idea was to run a rF2 dedicated server on that root too. This solution would be pretty expensive with costs of about 660€ a year.

Another idea was to keep our current hosting package for 120€ a year and use a dropbox account as a SVN replacement. A suitable dropbox account for our needs would cost us about 10€/month. So that would account to at least 240€ a year and about 420€ cheaper than the root server idea.

We are currently evaluating further options. And are happy to get input in services and solutions we may have overlooked.

So far, we didn’t mention additional investments such as buying books about physics, F1 season overviews, technical analysis or magazines which help us in developing and improving our mods. Also we have subscriptions on websites to get access to high resolution pictures of the cars. That all did cost a lot of money and in the end everyone playing our mods profits from these investments. For example AndreasT bought all old Autosimsport magazines on e-bay to give the team a good base to start with F1 1994.

So you see that modding and providing forums/blogs/websites for our mods comes at a price. In our second article we evaluate our financing ideas and hope to get some feedback from you.

Inside F1 1994: Measuring Williams

We welcome Radu Teo, a new modeler who has started to work on the new Williams model. The first preview we have for you is a bit different than usual. Over the years we did alot of research on the cars to get as many technical data as possible. This also involves blueprints (if possible, usually impossible), specifications and measurements. Very often we find contradictory sources and especially the wheelbase is something of regular debate for many cars. Williams is another prime example, as we have found 3 different measurements for the wheelbase: 2990mm / 2950mm / 2890 mm
Radu did among others the attached photo comparison to find the correct wheelbase. The picture gives 2.84m,which is shorter than any of our sources. Unless we find something canon and concluding, we will probably opt for a compromise of 2.89m.

Edit: And another one.

DDSUtils updated

It’s been 2 years since my DDSUtils were released the first time and updates came a year later. As I work myself into rFactor2, I did some updates to Radds and Badds and made them available on CTDP’s website. Radds is a simple texture reviewer and Dropps a texture converter. You can start both apps right from the website and use them. I will make the download of the latest versions available later. Badds is not available yet, as it will also get another update some time in the future.The DDSUtils are Open Source and hosted at github.

I hope this helps many Modders with their texture management. 🙂

rfDynHUD avaliable at github

The first release of rfDynHUD was almost 2 years ago and last year we decided to make the project Open Source to allow Third-Party developers to write their own widgets, enhance the code and contribute to the development. So far we gave access to anyone interested. This week we decided to take the next step and release the source code to the public.

rfDynHUD source code is now available at github. You can browse the project, clone your copy and start hacking new features with Github giving a great interface to manage all contributions and integrate them in future versions. If you have never looked into git, we suggest you do, because it allows for a very comfortable workflow.

We invite everyone who has had a look at Java to have a look.

Helmet overflow pt 3

Between the years took a milestone and mediocre and juluka finished all helmets for the mod. Next up, we have to get one of our driver bodies up to speed to get driver suits done.