IFM 2009 v1.3 released

Well, it’s out, no big whoop.

Version 1.3 brings you some adjustments to the Force-Feedback and Proview settings. Thanks to SandroX we could also add improved damage textures and improved driver hands animations.

In Germany, today is Mother’s day, so how about, you show her your favorite racing sim today and have her try it for a few laps?!

Cough, silence, drumroll, open curtain.

Today, we are proud to announce and also release our newest game addon. We bring you the International Formula Masters 2009 series for Assetto Corsa.
This is our first addon for this game and the first addon release since 2010. While originally announced as testbed project for rFactor2, we switched to Assetto Corsa during production.

After stepping away from the modding community and going on a long hiatus of several years now for reasons already written, CTDP has chosen to complete the 2009 International Formula Masters series formula car for Assetto Corsa. With most of the model and texture work finished a while ago, James ‘Juluka’ Bendy took on the job of implementing the mod in AC. We worked hard to implement the features the platform is offering at this point. Along with developing the proper physics of the car and bringing the model to the platform standards of Assetto Corsa, our goal wass to provide a quality open-wheeled addition to this platform that is not only a great experience to drive, but also a competitive car that many drivers will find an attractive option for multiplayer use.

We hope you enjoy the new series as we are excited finishing this project.

Installation

To install, simply unzip the file “ifm_2009” and place it in the following location where your Assetto Corsa game file path is located:

(Your Drive Letter): Program Files (x86): Steam: SteamApps: common: assettocorsa: content: cars

As the car was developed and built by Tatuus, the car will be located In the car selection menu under the Tatuus Icon

McNolo’s Bahrain for rFactor 2 released

A year ago, McNolo was working on a conversion of CTDP’s Bahrain track to rFactor2. Today, he released his track to the public.

There are 5 layouts with 3 GP variants included with the track:

  • Grand Prix 2012 (1 DRS zone, free to use out of DRS zone in practice and qualifiying)
  • Grand Prix 2013 (2 DRS zones limited to use all weekend only in DRS zones)
  • 6 Hours of Bahrain (Grand Prix Layout but with more garages, 18 teams + 2 located on the outside = 40 cars)
  • Endurance (same garages than 6 Hours)
  • Paddock (same garages than 6 Hours)
  • Outer (same garages than 6 Hours)
  • Inner


Download page to McNolo’s Bahrain

 Note, that CTDP gave permission for the conversion, but was not actually involved. We thank him for the conversion.

Introducing Madds

A few weeks ago, I had the idea for another small DDS-utility, which was born and roughly outlined within 2 hours. Now with a bit of cleanup and proper documentation let me present you: Madds – Memory Access of DDS

This tool is to visualize the projected memory usage of all DDS-texture files you have in your Mod’s folders. This helps to find textures that are very big or in wrong compression. You can see what kind of texture’s require which amount of space and you can get additional information by hovering over the area.

As all of my DDS-utilities it’s available as  Java-Webstart on or website without installation.
Source code is available under GPLv2 on github.

The times they are a-changin’

The truth

In every life, there is a point where you have to be honest to yourself and to everybody around you. This point has come now and we (CTDP) want to let you (our fans & followers) know, about our current status. The truth is, after CTDP 2006, a lot of the guys disappeared. In order to compensate the loss, we said CTDP2006 was maybe our most complete mod and will ever be. It was just perfect, it was something nobody has done before and maybe nobody will ever do again. The details and blood, sweat and tears we put into that mod was impressive. Not only to everybody who played the mod. Especially to everybody who was part of the develpment team. But with the release of the mod there was a turning point. Almost four years of develpment demanded its price – and it was very high. While right after the release motivation was high to start new projects, within months we lost many people which caused us to cancel the 2009 mod. Some members quit because they got offers from game developers, some just disappeared and never showed up again, most got job, girlfriend, life.

So what was the next goal to aim for? Our very much awaited 1994 mod should come back to life and should get released at some point. We started the project with our even more limited resources, did a very good research and even built up our own wiki for this season. We were ready to start over, but there is the point we struggled. We thought, it would be enough to give our “old” cars a smart overhaul to get them up to today’s standards, but after had our Wiki and about 5GB of photo material, we discovered, that lots of proportions are wrong and each car has a lot of visible mistakes. Our philosophy turns out as a “neckbraker”. We always wanted to achieve nothing else as the best we can do. And knowing about all the faults it wasn’t good enough for us anymore. So we started fixing the mistakes or even completly redid cars. So far we have 2 cars ready and 3-5 more on a good way. That makes 7 in total, but we’re far from coming even close to a release.

You may ask why?

To answer that question I have to explain what the motivation is the members in CTDP work for.

In a recent comment we were asked if it’s worth the extra time doing all the track specifiy upgrades, liveries etc. for CTDP 2006. That’s a tough question and I think that you can answer it with yes and no. No, because in hindsight it was a huge project that cost us so much time and yes because it’s shows the spirit of CTDP.

The spirit

We are always willing to improve ourself and keep pace with the professional developers in the industry. In case of CTDP 2006 we did something that even professional developers never did before and probably never will: recreate a complete F1 season with every upgrade that was raced during that season. We’ll probably never again create a mod to such an extent but we will always try new ways and technologies in creating our mods.[nbsp] In the end we’re not just modders that create the content, we’re also hackers and gamers. We have certain expectations on how a game/mod should look and feel – like everyone else out there and we work and fight to get the means to do it the way we want it.

Personally if I play a game like Forza, pCARS etc. I look at the graphics – especially the models and textures – and analyze them, to get inspired, to develop new techniques for myself. I wonder how they did this and that and then I try to do something similar to improve my work.

The consequences

The price of the high quality our mods comes in the time and sometimes money spent. Creating more detailed models and textures that look better ingame requires time and skill to create. And to get that skill you need to spend time to practise, improve and experience. To create more realistic physics you again have to invest time and also money to get your hands on books and/or magazines. Creating a mod is much more time consuming than 5 years ago; at least if you go with the time and exhaust all possibilities the engine offers you.

As I wrote above I often take a look at the techniques used in other games or even mods and try to recreate them or even improve them. It’s time that I could have spent in creating another model or whatever. But I think in the end it serves the mod more to create a better looking experience than to release the mod a few weeks earlier with models that look like they were already out of date two years ago.

The consequences – Part II

Our high standards have another negative side effect: it’s hard to find[nbsp] people that have the talent and more importantly the WILL to improve themselves. As every modding group knows members will come and go over time. That’s pretty normal and also understandable – quite often we loose members to the industry. So you’ll try to compensate your losses by recruiting new people. The best thing would be to get someone that[nbsp] already has the skills to work on your level so that you can continue your work without any transition.

As we’re already reached a pretty high quality standard it’s hard to find those people. It’s much more likely that you’ll find some less experienced modders that you’ll have to teach some of the advanced techniques.

I remember back in the days when I started modding with community 3D app that loads in GP2/GP3 models. In this app you can manipulate just the vertics a model had by clicking on it and entering x/y/z co-ordinates. That has tought me the real spirit of modding back in the days and I still remember these days with joy. As for textures, you had your common template and by today’s means you got create a mod within a few weeks.

Modding is constantly evolving and games like rFactor2 will provide us with new[nbsp] features that we want to and should take advantage of. Complexity and difficulty have become harder and where more possibilities were created, the amount of people who is actually able to use them diminishes.

The consequences – Part III

So if you haven’t stopped reading you now know how CTDP ticks, how we define our spirit and what consequences that spirit is asking for.

While we still have talented guys in our rows, it’s not enough. The amount of work for 24 cars is just too much. The IFM mod was a good way to see if we can effort single car mods with just one model and it was a good testing ground for us to get known to rF2 and its new techniques and limitations. So what are our learnings from IFM, if we reduced it to the team work and not to the technical part of the job.

The part of the team that is left, did a great job and we covered almost 80% of our todo’s.

Who is actually part of CTDP right NOW?

  • Stefan Triefellner (3D artist, Physics artist, 2D artist)
  • James Bendy (2D artist)
  • Dennis Schmidt (2D artist) – inactive atm
  • Andreas Neidhardt (3D artist)
  • Daniel Senff (2D artist, Website) – inactive atm

Volunteers who help us on occasion:

  • Michael Borda (ISI)
  • Luc Van Camp (ISI)
  • Tuttle (3D artist, 2D artist, Physics artist)
  • Ben (2D artist)
  • radu teo (3D artist)
  • AndreasT (Research)

Friends long gone or M.I.A:

  • afborro
  • Codan
  • Gonzo
  • Raulungo
  • Shaun Stroud
  • Paulo
  • Ennisfargis
  • Roberto Yermo
  • Eugenio Faria

What does that mean?

Maybe we have luck and 20 new, talented and well experienced members will join right after that post. But that would be something quite unrealistic to expect and actually not easy to handle as well ;). So for now, we will focus on IFM and then we will decide IF, HOW & WHEN we continue work on CTDP 1994.

It’s also possible, that IFM is CTDP’s last mod ever released. If CTDP will be gone, we want to see it go in glory and on a highnote, but we will let you know, as soon as we know. It will not be a decision easily made.

Thanks for your attention, patience and your support.

Your CTDP Team (everybody who was & is still part of the team).

Written by
Andreas ‘Neidryder’ Neidhardt

Signed by
Daniel ‘Dahie’ Senff
James ‘Juluka’ Bendy
Pier ‘tuttle’ Murru
Stefan ‘erale’ Triefellner

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. 🙂

Introducing: IFM – International Formula Master 2009

First of all, let us introduce you to a our latest project a little bit.

IFM – what is it?

The  International Formula Master (IFM) was the successor of the F3000 International Masters series. It was held as a supporting series during  the European WTCC races from 2007 till 2009. The series was a junior  Formula series which was thought as a stepping stone into the GP2 just  like the Formula 3 Euro Series. The cars were manufactured by Italian based company Tatuus and were comparable to smaller single seaters like the Formula 3 cars. But they looked more like a small version of a  pre-2009 Formula 1 car.

The  series was thought to run at least 3 more years, but FIA launched their own junior formula series in 2009 (Formula Two) and many teams and  drivers left.

Why are we doing this mod?

With  rFactor 2 coming up with lots of new features, we needed a “small”  mod  to test out all the new things and every aspect especially of the  new  packaging. The car was made by Stefan ‘erale’ Triefellner back in 2009. The 2008 version was  finished pretty quickly, but as the car always was supposed to be a rFactor 2 mod work was stopped eventually. With the upcoming rFactor 2  release it was clear that the mod would be picked up again so he gave it  a small touch up and brought the car to its 2009 spec and we started to experiment doing new shaders, materials and testing out all rF2  related  features. Within the upcoming weeks we want to show you in a  devblog series our progress, maybe a few experiments with new material  settings and so on.

What about the release?

Our current plan is to create a few liveries and helmets and release  the full grid with placeholder cars together with templates. This way  the community can create the missing or even own liveries/helmets and we don’t want to invest more time than needed for IFM and focus on F1 1994 (which is  still  our main priority for rF2) instead.

Here is a small teaser picture for our blog readers :).

 

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. 🙂

Dress

It’s been more than 4 years since our last big redesign of our website. All of the team loved the gritty-used paper look and it took quite some convincing to move to something new hopefully equally likable, while at the same time practical website. I hope everyone enjoys it as much as we. Right now there are no new contents, hopefully this will change soon. 🙂

Also we opened up a flattr-account, but more about this some other time.