Category: Work in Progress

How to release a mod …

Out there are many Tutorials covering the technical side of sim modding. If you want to find something about modeling, mapping, texturing you are sure to find something. Codan gave me the idea, that one tutorial was actually missing, which could be interesting for individuals and especially for novice modding groups facing their first release.
CTDP released their first big mod in 2003 and since then we had a few big releases. Since 2005 I’m coordinating and organizing the releases and follow everything live on release day. When suddenly the homepage changes and a download link pops up, that’s me. I also spoke with mirrors and did alot of the preparation beforehand and I figured, I could share some of these experiences I made during the last years and write a tutorial, about how to successfully release a mod. When you are done with the work, it’s not just uploading the mod somewhere. There are precautions you should think about beforehand.
This is no step-by-step program, but rather a checklist on topics you should cover for your release. I present some of the solutions we apply at CTDP, however those are not carved in stone and they rely on my personal experience. Other groups may do things differently and that’s alright. There is no best way and many differences between modding groups result from differences in release philosophies. This is our philosophy.

A short disclaimer. I’m writing about some communicational aspects especially related to the release dates. I have no intention to be unrespectful or even harmful. Talking about release dates is like talking about a surprise birthday party. You have to bend the rules to make it a surprise. I don’t endorse lieing in any way and on the contrary I think being fair and being respectful towards the community is one of the most important things. And another word about the community. My tutorial generalizes alot! You may not like, that I speak about users in such a generalized form, however there is a differences between one individual user and a faceless-mass of users. I say it again, I have no intention to make anyone feel screwed. 🙂

The topics we are covering in the next few days are these:

  1. Timing
    1. Schedule
    2. Have a date and a fallback
    3. Be vague on the dates
    4. Load estimation
  2. File Distribution
    1. Organize Mirrors
    2. Alternatives
    3. Leave time for upload
  3. Communication
    1. Prepare your news
    2. Be Available
    3. Prepare ways to contact you
  4. Release day
    1. Checkup
    2. Packaging
    3. Relax!
    4. One switch
    5. Celebrate!
    6. Aftermath

WIP Williams 09

Continuing our weekly sifting through the WIP-shots done in the past 2 months. I got a bunch of pictures of Williams 09. Done by Kevin ‘Fongu’ Wong. Fongu is not new and has frequently worked for CTDP before. Among his works are the models of the Super Aguri SA-05 and SA-06 in the F1-2006 mod. The car was also started in January. You gotta love the Williams Team, they released a couple of promotion renders of their car in orthogonal views. Since the presentation car in January, many things have been changed, which weren’t updated in the model yet. Which is why you see the presentation-nose on the car, not the one used in Melbourne. This will be done later.

Making of Ferrari F60 Model

Lets take a look at another car for the 2009 mod, which has been in progress so far. For our 2009 mod we could get David ‘Racervieh’ Bennewitz as a new modeller. His first car was Ferrari, which he worked on from January to March. The model is mostly done, will get some updates in the time to come. Racervieh documented his progress really thoroughly, so you can see the progression on the car.

David started in January and was the first in our team to start the car. He also comes from the GP4-community and had a thread describing his progress in more detail.

At the moment, we have several models in progress. At this early stage of the mod, we do not develop for one specific game. The raw-models and textures could be used for any game and it is in later stages, that we actually optimize the data for a specific game. Reports of this being the first mod for rFactor2 are exaggerated. At this point we just work and see what game is available when we are done with the basics. Knowing our speed, rFactor2 might become  the option of choice.