Category: Work in Progress

WIP Lotus 1994 Part 1

One of the remaining 3 cars, which didn’t receive their final texture yet was Lotus. Actually in 1994 Lotus ran with at least three distinct liveries. This is the early season livery of the first  4 GPs. Later in the season they started with a different design and at the first GP in Brazil Johny Herbert drove a unique Lotus-Livery.

James ‘Juluka’ Bendy is with the team for some time. He was working on some of our tracks and helped out on many occasions. When we were asking who wanted to help with the last remaining cars, he raised his hands and took the job. The first previews are promising and I can’t await the first textures. 🙂

More screens will follow in the next few days.

James ‘Juluka’ Bendy

Status of F1-1994

Work has been progressing quite good on the F1 1994 mod. After finishing his stint on the Cylon, Andy picked up the Pacific and is reworking the car to bring it ingame, He’ll try out a few new techniques and smoothen the car. Hopefully there is some new stuff to show you soon, more than just the model-previews we had so far.

So far there were 3 teams, whose textures haven’t been touched at all. Jordan, Footwork and Lotus haven’t been assigned to anyone until last week. So far we only had the low-resolution dummy texture Marco did last year. I began work on upscaling the Footwork texture. I found an issues, which forced some remapping, so I have no screenshots of the progress at the moment. Daniel ‘Codan’ Fredrich signed for the Jordan car, but there is nothing to show yet either. Lotus was taken by James ‘Juluka’ Bendy. He actually specializes on track textures, but asked for a chance to be involved in car textures and this was perfect, but more on this later.

We welcome Stefan ‘erale’ Triefellner to the physics team for 1994. He worked together with Andy on the Cylon and we could convince him to join in with 1994. The work on the physics hasn’t actively started yet, but he is currently collecting research material.

At this point I’d like to thank Christian, who contacted us a few weeks ago. He had a subscription of the Italian F1-Magazin “Auto Sprint” from the year 1994, which he began to scan for us. This is very helpful for technical data as well as photos. The amount of data you find on the internet is limited, so the more printed sources we can get the better. So if you have similar subscriptions about F1 in 1994, don’t hesitate to contact us. We are also all ear about book suggestions.

Destiny struck on the weekend, when our Subversion server died. We use Subversion to version-control all our source files, which is a great way to keep everyone in the team on the same page and have backups. From what we can tell, we have no dataloss, except the history of the past 2 years, all the latest and uptodate data are save and secure. We are currently setting up and configuring a replacement so work can continue without much break.

So much about the status of the mod. Next post will have some pictures again. 😉

WIP Sauber 1994

I just finished reviewing the early Sauber Mercedes for the F1 1994 mod. The model, as all models was done by BMWFan and is awaiting touchup by Neidryder to bring the car ingame. The textures were done by Codan. The story about Codan is, that he joined the team nearly 4 years ago and worked as a programmer on the Control Center and For the longest time he was able to hide is painting talent, but with this car for 1994 and even moreso on the cars for the SF-2009 game he has shown, that he can handle the tools and deliver some great cars. 🙂

Now, Sauber is a car where you don’t see that much details on the black texture. 8)

sauber94_1

WIP Ferrari 1994 part 2

We continue our WIP review with the 1994 Ferrari. This car (as pretty much all of them) was modeled by Marco ‘BMWFan’ Büttner. The textures are done by Mike Seymoure. He is also new in the team and Ferrari has been his first serious paintjob. The texture is not yet final and there will be some more work, but it’s on the right track. Please note, that this is “only” the A-version of the car.

Ferrari94wip

Hi, my name is Simtek S941…

…and I’m 15 years old. I was born in Banbury, UK and my father is a known engineer called Nick Wirth. Just after my birth, I’ve been travelling a lot and never really had a home. I’ve seen a lot of race circuits (sometimes only on Friday and Saturday but that’s another story – at least I could make the Pacifics look even worse, hehe) like Interlagos in Brazil or the boring TI Aida in the middle of nowhere in Japan. Now, some CTDP guys tried to recreate me and that’s what I look like from their point of view.

This is a demo version in texture size: 1024 x 1024. The livery is still by Marco Büttner (BMWFan), who also created the carshape. It’s very rough and has quite some mistakes in it. Marco has done all demo liveries and only did the Ligier livery in 2048 x 2048. But: he made all the car shapes.

Later on, Dennis Schmidt (mediocre) joined the team and took care of me. He made me look more real and higher detailed (2048 x 2048 now). AND: he created all liveries from Brazil to Monaco. Let me introduce them to you one by one.

This is the brazil spec and let’s just speak of a basic version, because this is what the other liveries are based on. It is still lacking a lot of sponsors that joined and left throughout the season. I must say I was a difficult child. I wanted too much but my parents couldn’t get the money for it. This is why I had a lot of regional sponsors and looked different in every race. Sometimes I even changed my look from Friday to Saturday to Sunday which made my creator (= mediocre) insane! Nick said it would bring some money and make me happier but I’d just say it was a huge waste of time.
Anyway, what’s different from the early version? Fogo de Chao joined and put a logo on my rear wing endplate. It left just after the race, though. The front of the airbox cooler (damn, it’s difficult to describe car parts) is now red instead of blue and the blue has changed as well, from hue 250 to 240 – less purple, more blue. There are some more little details you probably won’t notice but don’t bother about them, because they’re not too important.

Two weeks later, Nick decided to go to Japan. Well, why not? Again, I looked differently from Brazil. I’ve grown so to speak. Goodyear has joined Würth on the rear part of the nose cone and Russell Athletic got a place on the sidepod. Russell Athletic is now on the upper nose cone as well as Barbara. On the rear wing endplate (as a replacement for Fogo de Chao in Brazil), there’s some weird sponsor. You probably won’t see it on the picture but the text beneath the (what looks like the) German flag says: “No f****** idea”. And that’s pretty damn true – there’s not a single picture that can help identifying this particular sponsor. Of course, the text will be removed before it will be saved as DDS. It would be great if you could help finding out what or who this sponsor actually was as it could bring a little bit more of a real feel into the game later on. 🙂

Race 3 was a proper tragedy and we lost Roland. Now, surprisingly, whereas there are hardly any pictures (not to mention high-res) from Brazil and Pacific/Japan, there are tons of (high-res) images from the San Marino GP. And, given the certain circumstances, it’s probably my best-known livery. On the front wing, you can now see “Vernilux” (whatever that is). Alongside Goodyear and Würth, there’s now a weird company called “COX Sport Shoes” on the nose cone.

Then we moved to the glamour of Monaco but only with one car. As Roland was an important part of the team, we gave him a tribute on our car displaying his helmet art on the airbox, replacing Barbara. They had enough space on the nose cone anyway and just take a look at the sidepod! COX left, Russell Athletic swapped places with Goodyear and Würth and Paul Mitchell replaced Vernilux.

Last but not least, I guess I need to apologize for the graphics because – let’s face it – they…are not good. Of course the textures are – we don’t mess around with it, I promise. But my graphic card is not the best.
Don’t ask when the mod is done, please. Nobody knows. What’s next is the shader rendering before the car can go ingame. As soon as it happens, we’ll surely inform you and possibly provide you some screenshots.

Maybe you will see some of my friends like Larrousse (by mediocre), Benetton (by Dahie), McLaren (by What21A) or Ligier (by BMWFan) soon. 🙂

How to release a mod … 3. Communication

After covering the Timing of your mod release and the File Distribution methods available in our tutorial about how to release a mod, we are going to have a look at the Communication. Obviously this is a very wide topic, so I cover just some basics, you should provide on your release day. Continue reading How to release a mod … 3. Communication