A little status report to get you up to speed.
Since our open letter, we got a new designer, we welcome Neil to the team, who immediately began work on the helmets.
And helmets we need, as we have roughly 1/5th finished and many remain to be done.
For the cars the situation is much better. Dahie has been reviewing all textures and created the export scripts. We find small issues every now and then, collect and fix them. One official team texture hasn’t been finished yet.
The car model itself is done and ready. While shaders may change with future rFactor2 builds, The current look, is quite stable at the moment. Mianiak was working on the driver body (which was based on the shortly released ISI model). We had the first version ingame, but the animation didn’t convince us. The problem was not the animation itself, it was more or less caused by the insufficient rigging/weighting. Somebody within the team pointed out, it would look like the driver has broken wrists. So it didn’t fullfill our expectations and we changed plans. For the initial release we will go for a non animated driver. We will create our complete own driver model including rigging. But this may take a little bit longer. That’s why we’re using the non animated version as place holder.
Pier and Erale are working on the physics. Next to the official car manual erale already had, we got some more specs from Tatuus – the car manufacturer – helping us with some of the missing data. Grip levels, aerodynamics, suspensions are some of the usual suspects, they are trying to figure out at the moment. On a positive node, the car doesn’t spontaneously jump into the air anymore.
We recently started larger physics tests to see, how the mod handles in multiplayer and to get more feedback from users.
Outside of the mod preparations for release began. Note, the release is still a bit away, but preparations are a good way to see what’s missing and can be done easily in parallel. What’s done is done.
As we do with all our mods, we are going release templates for the IFM-2009 and with a high probably before the actual Mod-release. Dahie is working on these, the documentation and a special treat, we won’t reveal just yet.
Regarding the release, we have one big feature missing, which is rather important for a release: Sounds.
We don’t have a sound specialist at the moment and right now we’d be stuck with reusing ISI’s sounds from any of their rF2-mods released so far. We feel this wouldn’t do the mod justice, so we invite people interested and skilled in sound design to help us recreate the real feeling.
That’s it for today.