Category: Anything else

League physics requests

I have been sending out the league-physics-token in the past 2 weeks. I got more than 35 requests and I got a few things I’d like to ask for:

  • Please don’t write more than one mail. I can’t check every name and every address if I already send it, if you are already in the list or if you are new.
  • Please don’t hurry! I am a busy man and it may take 1-3 days to respond. So hurrying, won’t get you faster.
  • Talking to other members of CTDP may get you a file, but at the end it will be confusing, because I can’t check who already got the token, who mailed for it.

I caught up with all requests so far. Please mail me again, if I haven’t responded to yet.

Thanks for your attention!

Conversions & CD-checks

Shaun (Whata) released Imola 2006 several days ago on rfactorCentral.com. As you may know this track is a conversion, so he had his doubts if he was allowed to publish it. After talking to rfC-Admins several times he got the ok IF he would add a cd-check to the setup so that only owners of SimBin-games which included the original imola-track can install this conversion for rFactor. So he came to me and after some time he convinced me to do the setup-part.

Finally it worked as it was supposed to and he released the track. But it didn’t take much time until some people wrote comments that the cd-checks are stupid and that they would be forced to buy a Simbin-game for using the track for rFactor. STOP! Forced to do? I want to make one point clear: if someone does not have one of the games, he cannot have the track for rFactor. Nobody is forced to do anything!

The idea came up to add a similia check to our patch 1.1 so that only people with rF 1.255F without a crack can install the mod. We thought about that and we are not sure if that would make sense, I want to give you our pro & contras

Pro:

  • we would make it harder for people using a cracked rF to play our mod
  • we would make sure that people have the latest rF-version (1.255F)

Contra:

  • it is not our job to deal with piracy
  • if would force the user to have a clean rF-installation (some people use cracks to avoid cd changes)
  • maybe the user wants to run CTDP 2006 on a different version 1.255F
  • maybe the user wants to install it into a temp-folder and copy it by hand to see what gets changed

So I would like to hear your oppionions about that. As this could be called “copy protection” somehow I want to ask that you focus on the topic and don’t start a general discussion about copy protection-software.

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. 🙂

The Lost Mods

CTDP is in its 7th year, naturally, during this time, there have been some projects, we have never talked about. Projects we never announced and often died in an early stage of development. Although CTDP is best-known for their F1-mods, we often planed to release some not-F1-related mods. Today we want to show you some of the projects that never were and never will be. I invite you to tour through our archives. Continue reading The Lost Mods

Another week of beta testing …

Another week of betatesting is over. We got about 30 new reports, mostly minor stuff, but we are on it. Williams will get some more attention, there slipped a few things. Shaun is just on Super Aguri, fixing some small bugs on the texture. Alex has finished the driver body and finished the showroom. I should begin work on the manual today, if I find the motivation (your call). The task nobody wanted to do, so we had to play inverse-russian roullete in the team: 5 bullets for 6 people, last man standing has to do the job. Lucky me.

Today is the difference…

The difference of today to other days is, that today two people apologised for their language in the mail. I could break one of my pencils when I read this. This is not my first rant about this, but I get the feeling it just doesn’t stop, heck why do you talk at all, when you have to apologise for trying your best. Quit it now, you’re embarrassing yourself!

Few weeks ago, I got a very cool and nice mail in spanish. I could barely read it, but I got the point and had people translate it to me for confirmation. Please don’t apologise or just write in German, Spanish, French or Chinese, we get it deciphered, I promise. 😉

Update: I actually thought about adding a PS-Paragraph, but thought “nah, don’t”. Now, I add it:

PS: Please stop asking for Beta-testing. We will not accept any new people and being a good driver is no criteria!