Category: Beta testing

Our 8th Birthday! – Bahrain V2 Public Beta Release

Exactly 8 years ago, we started a little project. Today the “Cars & Tracks Development Project” is one of the most respected modding group’s. We could never have expected such success would happen, Our mods are used on public simulators, on TV, even at Games Convention’s. We did a lot of mods for many different games in the past eight years and for sure we will continune our work for rFactor and its successor.

Bahrain International Circuit v1.0 was the first CTDP release for rFactor and brought you one of the newest and also most exciting GP circuits in the modern era, Dusty surface and desert feeling guaranteed!

Now exactly 3 years later, on CTDP’s 8th birthday, we gave the track a major facelift with new Textures, Shaders and additional layouts and cool features. We hope the community enjoys our birthday present!

Continue reading Our 8th Birthday! – Bahrain V2 Public Beta Release

McLaren polished

When I wrote the Making-Of for Toro Rosso I already had a second text in mind for the McLaren. However time constraints pushed it back several times. Also I was waiting for somebody to actually ask for it. I ended up sending Mediocre to send somebody to ask, to keep the illusion. I prepared the text anyway. 🙂

This is about the chrome-effect of McLaren.

Continue reading McLaren polished

Patch 1.1 Progress part 2

Good afternoon,

Some you may be wondering what is it with the patch, moving arms and what else , when when and when 🙂  Probably you know us well enough by now, that it is done when it’s done, but I’ll give you a little update.

The patch has been in testing  now in the last week(s) or so.  We’ve also had some feedback from top leagues such as FSR since the initial release, such that we have been able to tweak the physics. This has been mainly in the hands of our Physics Guru Michael Borda (aka speed12) , who probably had to endure most of the stresses for this patch,  but ultimately we are limited in resources, and we have no intention of releasing it without feeling the job is done.  Nevertheless,  the iron is getting hot, and the time drawing nearer , so completion looks more likely by the day.

The cars wont feel very different from the base release, it is mostly minor tweaks, but the tyres have had quite a significant overhaul with better heating and tyre wear.   So now you really got to test those componds every race and decide which one works best for you over a stint. 

In addition, the tyre slip curves have been improved with increased resolution, to provide a more precise TC response, this means that both for the non-TC and TC drivers,  this gives a better feeling to the driving experience, however, it has alse been received with some mixed feelings, hence, the TC system is currently being tweaked, and hopefully finalised today. Your previous setups for V1.0 will probably need revising, personally I have found this to be the case.

On the multiplayer side of things,  I have been working on making a compact version of the dedicated server version.  An idea I had some time ago that dedicated servers don’t need to  nearly as big as the actual mod itself, this will make an interesting story that I’ll write about some other day.  However, while this idea is true, it didn’t come witout some issues in testing, which hopefully have now been resolved.  Currently, the uncompressed version of the dedicated server is around 70 Mb, around 10 times smaller than the compressed version of the installer for the V1.0  dedicated server release.  After encrpytion this server size will increase by 20% or so, but still, the dedicated server installation would be less than 100 MB uncompressed.  It is however still in the hands of a few testers, to see if this  idea holds ground in all scenarios, before we can definitely promise this compact version, but we hope so, and it is looking more likely by the day.

This kind of server installation is useless as a client, you simply wont see any cars in the showroom if you tried, it is for the dedicated server only and nothing else.

As said before the moving arms will also be released,  we only need an installer for it, but it will not be on the same day and will not be part of the main installation, but as promised, shortly after.

That’s about it from the CTDP world and patch V1.1.

Thanks for reading 🙂

And a third time

I got the new mapping for Benetton from Marco and started to update the old texture to the new layout. The changes could have been much worse. On the contrary, Marco adressed my issues brilliantly and it’s much better to work now. Thank you! Here are a few early work-in-progress shots. Marco, I’m sure the final version will meet your expections and your changes will make it a great car! 🙂

ben194v3_1ben194v3_2ben194v3_3

Patch v1.1 for CTDP 2006

Good morning!

As you guys may know we’re working on the CTDP 2006 Patch v1.1. But it has become more than a patch. There were some physics changes as well as a lot of graphical bugfixes. Caused by physicchanges old setups can be useless.  So at the moment we’re testing the patch to see if we resolved all the bugs we had in our bugtracker. The whole patch will be around 700MB. There will be a v1.1 fullinstaller as well as a new server edition. While the patch installer became pretty big, the server edition is really small. 13 MB contains everything you need to run a dedicated server with CTDP 2006. But you have to remove the v1.0 DSE Installation first BEFORE you install the new, small DSE version.

About a possible releasedate… well you guys know us 😉 It’s done when it’s done, but you guys can be sure we have something special for you on releaseday. The patch and the fullinstaller will be released as torrent only for about a week. After v1.0 release we had 15 http mirrors and ALL of them crashed after a while because of the heavy traffic. So torrent is our only choice for this time.

Continue reading Patch v1.1 for CTDP 2006

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!

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.

Changelog for Release Candidate 2

The buglist is nearly empty. Some minor text-stuff which will be fixed in the next version. So the car polishing is nearly done. We dry our hands, but they remain sweety. Why is that?

CTDP F1 2006 Mod rF – Release Candidate 2
=========================================
– 0000201: [Cars] incorrect williams steering wheel (Afborro) – resolved.
– 0000432: [Installer] LeoFFB gets installed in the wrong directory (Neidryder) – resolved.
– 0000430: [Cars] Error on Williams Mirrors (Neidryder) – resolved.
– 0000429: [Cars] BMW Right Front Pivot Point (Neidryder) – resolved.

Changelog of Release Candidate 1

The days get shorter, the perceived days get longer, still a lot to do, to plan, to organise to write. At least the reported list of bugs is pretty much solved. Hopefully we catch them all till the release. Here is the changelog. I don’t get my work done, thank god this is over soon.

CTDP F1 2006 Mod rF – Release Candidate 1
=========================================
– 0000408: [ConfigurationsCenter] missing gen-descriptions (CoDan) – resolved.
– 0000404: [Cars] Flipup on Williams (Neidryder) – resolved.
– 0000420: [ConfigurationsCenter] Launcher (CoDan) – resolved.
– 0000426: [Installer] Installer does not create startmenu-entries (Neidryder) – resolved.
– 0000424: [Installer] Start Menu default name (CoDan) – resolved.
– 0000411: [ConfigurationsCenter] Needing a second pair of eyes (Afborro) – resolved.
– 0000423: [ConfigurationsCenter] leoFFB-helptext (Neidryder) – resolved.
– 0000422: [Installer] Deinstall (Neidryder) – resolved.
– 0000401: [Cars] Reflection issues on Toro Rosso (WHAT21A) – resolved.
– 0000419: [Cars] Reflection issues on Rosbergs Williams (WHAT21A) – resolved.
– 0000418: [Cars] Williams suspension (Neidryder) – resolved.