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

Light – Superleague Formula 2009

It has been quiet here? Right? Wrong!

We haven’t posted alot, because for the past 4 months we got sidetracked with a new project with ISI, which was released today. ISI approached us with the possibility of producing the contents for an official Superleague Formula Game. Afborro led the project and modeled the car. Our 2D-Artists created 18 liveries for each car and additional textures. All in all we spent 3 months working on the game and one month for testing and tweaking with together with ISI. This game is the second project we did with ISI. Our responsibility was with the cars, physics and Alex also coordinated the efforts to bring all tracks up to a similar quality. The game provides very enjoyable driving, very different from F1-racing, more down to wheel-to-wheel driving. The quality, despite the short development time is fully up to our standards and when you play the game, you will see it has CTDP written all over it.

Some more news about the game and the series are on our website and at VirtualR.net Over the next time we will do some entries about the Making of the Game. Stay tuned and try the demo. 🙂

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