Category: Announcement

Call for Collaboration: Museums

An important part for building mods is research and we spent a lot of time to collect pictures, technical manuals and other resources to simulate the Mods as realistic as possible.
When we embarked on the 1994 mod, we knew, we wouldn’t have the same access to high-resolution material as we did for 2006, but over the years we collected over 3GB of photo material from the season. Still, every now and then we wondered what happened to the old cars from 1994 and where they ended up. Our research found some of them in Museums around the world, but for many cars we did not find any information. This brought us the idea to crowdsource this search.
We’d like to know which museums around the world have any Formula One cars. I’m sure this is very useful information for other Modders as well, which is why we invite anyone to join in on the research and help to collect a complete list of museums and their exhibited cars.

For this purpose we set up an Etherpad and started to collect and discuss car models and museums.

List of Formula-One models in museums

Etherpad is a javascript-based collaborative tool for parallel writing. Once you enter, you can change your name in the top-right corner, or you can write anonymously. You see anyones writing in a different color and you can just come in and help writing. Every change is saved automatically, so vandalism can be traced.

Once we feel we have a complete list, we may republish this here on the devblog, so everyone benefits from the research.

In a second step, we are also looking for people who’d like to go to a few museums and take pictures of selected cars. If you have a museum near you and would like to help out, contact us.

Going social

There are a few trends that are hard to avoid and you have have to embrace them at one point. CTDP comes into the social networks… to take over the world.
We have established beachheads in Facebook and Twitter and are preparing our invasion.

CTDP on Facebook
CTDP at Twitter

We will be posting more frequent small updates. WIP shots will be found there first.
To be the first to get all information, we suggest to follow us there and subscribe our devblog via RSS.
On average you will be notified about 3-4 days before the news hit VirtualR and another day before any other news blogs pick it up. 😀

Despite the new ways, we are still available on the established ways.
Use the forum to ask questions and get help support for our Mods. We suggest to post any technical questions there, so the google can find it and anybody else can find the answer to the question.
If you have questions of more private nature please use our contact form.

For informal contact check out our members lists in facebook and twitter.

Had you already subscribed us in the social world, you would have seen this Jordan WIP shot already 4 days ago:

Next generation Bahrain track

For the past year, we had Eric ‘ennisfargis’ Tozer working on the next version of the Bahrain International Circuit. This would include the 2010 layout and some major improvements on the tracks elevations and ultimately it would convert the track for rFactor2 once that is available. This work proved to be rather tedious as it is very hard to get hands on proper elevation data. Consumer GPS data is not exact enough and so we compiled height data from many different sources and are in the process of updating the track accordingly.

Fortunately for Eric, unfortunately for us, he got the foot in the door with Reiza Studios and won’t be able to continue his work on the track. This leaves the track in a work in progress state with nobody in the team to pick it up.

We are therefore looking for interested track modelers to get in touch with us to work on this track and help convert it to rFactor2. The track was a big success and it would be a shame not to bring it to the new platform. A lot of work has been done and we will provide help to step into the existing project as good as possible. Still you will need to know the basics of track editing, FFD modifiers and track exporting.

As with our other projects. CTDP is a dynamic team with people coming and going. With the death of rFactor and the continued waiting for rFactor2 we had more people disinterested in modding lately and therefore encourage everyone who has dome some modding and would like to continue and work in an organized, collaborative and enjoyable atmosphere to get in touch with us and see how you can help on the continued development of Bahrain Circuit and 1994.

The easiest way is to register and post in our forum, or to send an email in our contact form.

Thank you, Eric, for you contributions and wish you good luck at Reiza!

CTDP Drinkup in Munich

In March I met with Raül, one of our painters and since them I’ve been trying to arrange trips to other members in the team. This has been quite hard with all our schedules and I’m very happy that at least my trip to Munich is rock-solid now, to meet Andy, Marco and David.
Now, we had an idea. Just because it’s been quiet in the blog, doesn’t mean we have nothing to talk about and we thought this would be a nice chance to get in contact with some racing fans from Munich and the area. We would arrange a location and have a nice evening with some beers. Talking about Modding, SimRacing, Life, the Universe and Everything.

If you are interested get in contact with us at dahie (at) ctdpworld.org
The time will be Saturday, September 25th in the evening.  We have not ordered any table yet, so I’d like to get feedback till thursday evening to make the arrangements and to give out the details later.

I’m curious about how many take on the offer, to meet some of us in person. 🙂

take care,
Dahie

And again in German: Continue reading CTDP Drinkup in Munich

Enough already :)

Seriously, we never got so much feedback on a call-for-help. We had 8 people contacting us and we are currently welcoming everyone to the team, introduce them to our infrastructure and hand out the work. We were really surprised by this number and have to work to give everyone their work packages. This will be a new wave and hopefully we have a lot to show you in the next couple of months.

At the same time as I’d like to say thanks to those who responded to our call, I’d like to quit the call-for-help now. CTDP is always looking for new members, even when we don’t say it out loud. Having so many new faces at once is very nice, but also a challenge. I don’t want to discourage anyone from contacting us, but we can’t handle more people right now. Instead I’d like to say, contact us in a couple of weeks when the dust has settled and we can say where we are at again.

Thank you for the responses,

PS: I wonder if such a call also works for track texture artists…

Update of the ChampionShipManager NX

Today we released an update for our small championship editing tool called ChampionShipManager NX. There is nothing really new, main focus was to fix bugs and improve the usability. The complete change log can be found in the readme file (available in English, French, German & Spanish). Follow this way to the download page.

Updated DDS-Utils released

I finished work on for a new version of some of my DDS-Utils. Badds received no changes, but Dropps and Radds are now both available as version 1.1.

Both tools now support 2 more graphics formats. You can now import GrandPrix4-TEX and TGA-files, This allows you to convert GP4-textures in one drop. In Radds you can now refresh the file system tree. I also fixed many errors and improved stability.

Radds is for reviewing and preview of TEX and DDS-Files,

Download Version 1.1: for Windows, for Mac, for Java

Dropps now supports conversion from TGA and TEX.

Download Version 1.1: for Windows, for Mac and for Java

Badds was not updated. it’s for batch scaling large amounts of DDS-files at once.

Download Version 1.0: for Windows, for Mac and for Java

All three tools are released under the Gnu Public License V3. The source code repository at Github is open for everyone and I encourage forking and modification. At Github is also an issue tracker and I’m happy about feedback.

Ultimate release of ultimate patches

We are happy to announce a big release day. We have new versions for F1-2006, rfDynHUD and the DDS-Utils. Checkout the full news on our website.

As you will see the Mod is available only via torrents for the moment. In a few days once the big load decreases, we will add traditional HTTP-mirrors.
Speaking of mirrors. We need new mirrors and if you want to support us by hosting our mods you are welcomed. Contact us for details and we will link to you from our site. Please note, that our download volume is pretty high due to the big file sizes, so be aware, that we produce alot of traffic.

Thank you all and have fun with the Mod and the tools!