Category: Announcement

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. 🙂

PSRTV coverage update

There were some technical difficulties with the RaceCast, so it’s delaying for about an hour. New start in 35 minutes at 7pm gmt. The page of the coverage at PSRTV is getting quite a load obviously and got a MySQL-failure, we hope they fix this soon, may happen any minute.

In the meantime, my colleagues and I are already warming up for the interview. I bet it’ll be fun.

We are also in the chat, although we won’t be chatting simultanously: This takes alot of attention.

Update 19:11 gmt: Qualifying 1 just started, however I heard the video is not yet up. They are working on it.

Update 19 36 gmt: Either the load on the server is alot higher than anticipated or an DDOS-attack is running on the server. Ian is rotating to get it working.

Regarding Server Edition

It’s one of the questions we got the most during the last few days, so let me clarify it here.

There won’t be an Equal-physics aka Server Edition!

It’s a long discussion, that began when we release F1-2005 1.0 without SE, continued when we released with SE and is still up. Our opinion was, that the SE hurt the mod. We spent alot of time working out the indivudiual carphysics and we did so even more on the F1-2006 mod. SE destroys that.

At the end the discussion is about whether it’s worth building physics for every team. 10 years ago, this wasn’t the default and Simracers tried everything to get individual physics for each car. Today with multiplayer being a must this has changed. It’s no problem having unique physics for each car, but people want to drive F1, while degrading it to a standardized equal-car series. I could imagine the same peoples outcry when they hear plans for standardized components, engines and aerodynamic rules. But hey I get off topic. CTDP put alot of effort into the physics and we won’t castrate them.

On a technical node. We included so many team-dependatand variables in the physics, like the suspension-model and brakes-model, that it’s impossible to have equal-physics. At best “near-equal”-physics.

Next word goes to leagues. our stand on the issue is related to public servers and public downloads. For leagues we have the option to give out a “near-equal-physics” patch, on request. While we don’t endorse it in public racing, we see the necessity in league racing.

And finally just to clarify. The “Dedicated Server Edition” is the original mod without any textures and sounds. Thereby it’s “only” about 750mb big and can be installed on rF-Multiplayer-Server without taking up 4gb of hd space.

Update: With the release of version 1.2 of the 2006 mod, we introduced a tool to create your own equal-physics variant of the mod inherited by a car of your choice. Check out the mod deriver in rFactor/ModData/CTDP/CTDP06/mod_deriver/

Read me, oh my god, read me!

Some time ago there might have been a discussion like this. We sat the other day and thought aloud…

Gosh, this mod is gigantic and this mod is complicated and all the upgrades they are complex, people will be wrecking their brain.

What can we possibly do?

We could write a readme or a manual!

… but who is gonna read this, actually?

Yeah, dumb idea, but wait… what if we release them beforehand?

Hm, this might work. They are killing us to get the mod, so maybe we can hold them off for a few days AND convince them to read just by giving out the readme and the manual a few days early.

Let’s do it …

So, uhm enough said.

Manual for CTDP F1 2006

This covers the first roll out, setup advise for engine, brakes, tires and more, the ControlCenter, some basic FAQ (nothing new actually) and the everlong credits list.

And Readmes in English, French, Italian and Spanish.

(And don’t ask why we totally forgot to make a translation in our mother tongue 😉 )

Thanks to our translators! Oh and while I was already credited here 2 weeks ago for my work on the Manual, I have to pass it to Codan, who jumped in, when I had to jump in for some other guy in a different project. Also kudos to Michael, Gonzo and Arloch, who spent the time writing and explaining how the setups and upgrades work.

Ok, and now I fall in my bed and wonder what I have forgotten… guess I’ll learn tomorrow morning.

Update 4. Dec 2008:

Ok, we addressed some of the bugs in the manual, thanks for the feedback! Alex added some addition plr-settings for texturesize and mirrordetails. I added 2 FAQ-entries, which came up here in the comments.

We also added the German translation of the readme. 😉

Last call and some press related issues

We are beginning to jump nervously from one foot to the other. I’m speaking with all the mirrors, who already contacted us and manage everything for the release, so they are prepared. We will setup a main torrent in combination with several regular download-servers. If there are webmasters who’d like to help out for the release, we’d really appreciate your support! So you know what to expect, the installer of the basic mod will be 1GiB in size. So the traffic is huge and we don’t want to crash servers (been there, done that), so if you want to help us, be aware of the load!

We have one small butsy. We got asked for exclusive releases like “you release on our place first and we make give you promotion.” Thanks, but no thanks. During that stretch, a few outreach offers even came from independent bookmakers experimenting with digital content tie-ins, hoping to feature music alongside sports coverage. It was flattering, but not what we’re about. There has only been one very good offer, which we discussed long and wide, but which we declined in the end as well. We also got bad offers, where we just asked ourselves where our payoff is for sharing our name and publicity. So we will manage our release ourselves and don’t do any exclusives.

On the brighter side, everybody can contact us, ask questions, interview, make reviews and we will respond and get back to you. Either write to our public email address or my address, it doesn’t matter, I’m the one getting the mail anyway.

Fake 3D arms and plastic trees

Fake plastic trees , when I think of the 3d arms in rfactor it reminds me of a Radiohead song and that is exactly what any of the 3d arms are in rfactor 😉  but it gets raised again and again, today we had a post about, and people want them, and as some may have read, I did promise some some time back after release I would do something.

I appreciate this is also an area that is a must have for some and not for others, nevertheless I wouldn’t want to deny poeple enjoying our upcoming ctdp06 mod, if not having those fake plastic trees prevented them playing it at all.

I am not going to spend a great deal perfecting them, this took all of 15 minutes for a team to make, so it is literally not much to do for all teams, but I did these some time back and only Ferrari done right now to try it. If you don’t like them sorry 🙂 I made these based on our biped driver model used for the current driver with static arms.

As such we wont support it, it wont be part of the install at release time, and I am not sure how soon afterwards I will release them, but probably of the order of the same week or fortnight or so I will make available a download, so it is simply a question of extracting some files to the team folders (and it wont cause mismatches).

Also  I will add some notes about how if you wanted to disable them in cockpit view, but only have them working in the tvcam, this is also possible.

So no more need to email us about fake plastic trees, or ask 🙂 

Regarding the CTDP05 arms email we had the other day, it has not been discusssed yet what to do, we are in a busy period right now and expect delays in replies to such things. Until they have been dicussed internally but as was asked nicely and  done the right way, you will hear from on of us, at some point.

CTDP & Formula Sim-Racing Collaboration – Showcase Race

Hi everyone, Over the past few week’s and month’s, CTDP & FSR have worked close to get the 2006 mod as good as possible with alot of the FSR driver’s taking part in our beta test series race’s throughout the last few month’s.

With this we have decided to end the series on a high note and broadcast the event Live on PSRTV for all to enjoy. The event will take place on December 6th from 18:00GMT using the CTDP 2006 mod @ Interlagos Circuit Brazil. Interview’s with dev’s will take place during the broadcast aswell as the usual high drama FSR action on track with the likes of Patrick De Wit, FSR WS PRO Champion Mikko Puumalainnen, David Greco, FSR WS ACE Champion Fred Gosling and many more FSR regular’s (including me 🙂 ) all taking part in the event. You never know we may even have a very special announcement to make, so join us December 6th 2008 for Live coverage of CTDP-FSR Showcase race live from Interlagos, Brazil on Prosimracing.com

We would like to Thank Dave Carr-Smith for organizing the race and getting all car’s assigned to driver’s to make the race as competative as possible.