Work in Progress – Page 8 – CTDP Development Blog

WIP McLaren 09

This car was actually started, before we decided to beginn the mod. Zunic ‘Spoony’ Bekir was already working on the car and showing WIPs, which looked very promising. So we invited him to join us and he agreed. At the moment he is working on the BrawnGP.

Those previews were made in the first week of may. You can more details about the model in the development thread at GrandPrixGames.com

Disclaimer: Please note, that the shots are a couple of weeks old, since then the models have been updated and to the Australia-configuration. Therefore, these WIPs can have inconsistancies.

Waterfall concept

After the 3 days detour for a 1994 mod of a different kind, the work will continue on the actual CTDP94 mod. The status is, that 2 cars are done. Yeah! Done as in, the model and the textures won’t be touched again untill it is ingame. Marco and I are in the process of steadily working through the cars. I check the textures we got from our painters, add noise and dirt, prepare the alterations for the second driver, cleanup and make the look consistent. If necessary I beg Marco to do some last minor changes, but often enough, he finds new things himself.

It could be so easy, if the world was a water fall, we would just work step by step and be done in a months. Modding doesn’t work like this. Does actually anything work like this? Waterfall concept describes, that you work on something step by step and you never go back to a previous step to change something. This doesn’t work for us. It is very annoying to find bugs in the last moment, which would require rework earlier on the texture, remapping or even remodelling. To avoid this, we take this long time to review the material we got and try to make it as right as possible, even if it means to to the third iterations of Benetton.

This was one of the things that caught us on the 2006 mod. Late additions, that required changes to earlier working steps. We learned so much during the creation of the mod, that it was quite a task to keep all cars on the same quality level, which is important for a consistent mod. I think for 1994 we are prepared not to get caught up again. Once the first batch of cars is ingame, we will see. 🙂

Doing their homework …

Working on old F1 seasons sometimes brings interesting details to the surface. We are close to finishing the Pacfic-car. Today, Marco learned, that Pacific never finished any GP in 1994. Mediocre and tried to identify a few track-versions and came to the conclusion, that the team had a pitstop during the Monaco race just to change a few logos on the sidepod.The track-versions for Simtek will be a horror, because there have been logo changes on every GP. We haven’t deciphered everything yet, so I can’t say if we decide to limit it to a few crucial changes. Let’s not get carried away here. 🙂

Update: one day later

During research I found this museums-car. There are 2 persons here, who didn’t do their homework: The one who claims this is a Williams and the one who thought that painting a 1992(?) Benetton with the 1995 colors (in a bad way) would be enough to sell it as the champions-car.

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 🙂

Chapter B-194 – 4 Years Ago

I elaborated about the general history of the CTDP94 mod in the last long entry. Now let’s take a look at one specific car: Benetton Ford B-194. I liked the Benettons of that time, and since I never painted any car, that has ever won a GP, I actually wanted to take the Championship-car this time. While the mod has quite a troubled history single cars can also have quite an history, which I’d like to show you on this example. Read, why it is not good to work on a project for too long. Continue reading Chapter B-194 – 4 Years Ago

Pacific 1994

Once again an inventive heading that says everything. These pictures show you the current state of our work on the Pacific PR01.

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! 🙂

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

Benetton B194

After weeks of working on that damn car – thanks to Dahie – i think i just have made the best out of it. And also the best shape out of the 1994 cars. So now it is up to Dahie to give the car its unique livery this shape deserves 😀 it is not that i want to put some pressure up on Dahie, but everything else than perfect and i will put the car into the trash and keep the old one 😀 i have added some close ups from the new front suspension and brake model. this new suspension and brake model will be given to all cars, since i don’t like the old ones any more. later this evening i will add some screens of the cockpits, so you can see your future working place 😉

CTDP 1994 – WIP (Williams In Progress)

Hi all.

I’ve been working so hard this week (to be honest, since yesterday) to get the paintjob done as accurate as possible. I have “Reading Week” so no University this week… It’s supposed that we have to read, not painting… but well… Here’s what I have so far in 2 days of hard work.

More screens after the jump!

Continue reading CTDP 1994 – WIP (Williams In Progress)