What about the templates?

I read just a few people asking for templates. Well to those few, templates will come. Most are pretty ready,but they where done before the betatesting so they need to get some of the bugfixes.I’ll work on it during the week to get them out as soon as possible. They have been on my personal todo list long enough. Just so you know, we didn’t forget them.

Sound Issue

Hi guys,

We want to clear some things about this now. First of all, the whole CTDP Team is the opinion, that Michael Ode did a good job on our sounds. But this topic is very sensetive that’s why we decided to add more sounds to cover all tastes. That’s why we added the ISI BMW sounds and asked FSone for permission of their sounds.

Now Luca de Leo appeared and said we don’t have any permission. He gave permission to FSone and they are not allowed to give permission to anybody else. Well we’re sorry for that, but how could we know that? We asked the Fsone guys.  We went the offical way to get permission so we couldn’t know.  So there are two options now for us. Delete it out of the mod or add the credits with the next patch. We hope to get in contact with Luca,soon to sort that out. We announced the use of these sounds long time ago and more than a few times,too. So we’re wondering a bit why there was no e-mail or no try to contact us about that issue.

The unofficial MMG Soundpackage was not part of our release and we didn’t know anything about it. If anybody wants to add more sounds to the mod using the ControlCenter function we have no problem with it but PLEASE, ask for permission!

To make one point clear, we did nothing wrong, we thought we gave credits to the right persons for the sounds. We’re sorry that this situation now happened but we couldn’t know.

Update:

Luca gave us permission now when we add him to the credits next time we update the mod. Thanks Luca de Leo for giving permission for the use of FSONE sounds!

Beta testing and the left-overs

How do I start this. I had some software engineering courses, which also covered the topic of beta testing. Actually 5 people testing the software really deeply are supposed to be enough to find 90% of the bugs. Adding more people to this will increase the chances of finding more bugs insignificantly. We had lots of testers, which in my opinion did a good job. Some were very verbose about bugs and although we may have sounded annoyed sometimes, we were glad about every issue reported and we always encouraged that.

But still, the situation was tough: 3 game modes, 6 possible gen-files, 11 teams, 17 gp configs for upgrades and skins and many more variations. There is no good approach to this amount of permutations. We played with the thought to do organised check-list testing for everything, which resulted in a 33-sheet spreadsheet, which was unhandy to use. So we trusted, that so many people with so many testers, most bugs are found.

In my opinion this worked and even though there are a few slips that are reported, so far nothing serious was found. We got emails with feedback and with some technical advise (yes, we also learn new things every now and then!), which we are thankful for.

Everything is collected in our bugtracker and will be reviewed in the next couple of days. I can’t tell yet when there will be a patch, since nothing serious is to fix, we don’t have to rush.

Still we welcome and value your feedback!

Release review #1

So, the website slowly calms down and regains their usual speed. We enjoyed the first day without this monkey on our back. I don’t know who in the team kept his intention of not browsing any forums for at least a week. I didn’t, I read every comment I could find and have to say a big thank you! The big majority of comments is really nice, we appreciate every single one! Alot of questions where asked in the last 36 hours and even though we tried to read up, there is no way to answer them all imidiately. I hope to cover some topics during the week here in the devblog. (Bugs, Templates…).

Today I’d like to start with the release itself. We are getting the first statistics and we have to say one thing. We knew the stress on the servers, on the mirrors would be huge, I thought I planed it accordingly, but actually the load was alot heavier. Shortly before the release, we had a last talk in the team and we were convinced, that 11 mirrors would be fine and could handle it. If 11 is not enough, what is? Well, they got maxex out. Some hit their traffic-limit. Some where taken down by their provider, because of too many connections. This is why, I always stressed, that this is no childs-play release.

Still, I want to say thank you to any of our mirrors. I doesn’t matter how long you survived, you helped to handle the release and we appreciate the sacrifices you may have, rebooting now. CTDP doesn’t have an own dedicated download server. We rely on external server to download our mods. I am always overwhelmed, when people offer us downloadspace! I did two calls for server this year and within hours people contacted me per mail and offered to help. Thank you! These people allowed us to give you free, fast, ad-free downloads. For as long as they could anyway. 🙂

Moving on, the torrent runs perfect. Sascha gave me the statistics of the initial torrent-file and  sp far the overal traffic is roughly 2000 downloads. Adding to this are between 5000-6000 downloads on the HTTP-server downloaded from our webpage. I haven’t gotten statistics from rFactorCentral yet. Calculate each download with 1Gb, and you see what stress we put on this Interweb. 🙂

I don’t wish to break things. Alot things did break. The live stream at PSRTV.  rFactorCentral, which was down sunday morning and had to turn off their mod rating. Our mirrors. Obviously we didn’t plan this mayhem, and not only us underestimated the response to the release. Still, having the power to crash the internet or influence it in such a way presents a kind of power which feels satisfying and good also makes us a bit proud after such a long work. You guys are maniacs and we love to mod for you, if this is your response. 🙂

The privilege to be proud….

Well 2 years and about 5 months are gone now. We started a project during an exciting period of formula one racing. Michael Schumacher had his last chance for his 8th title. For most of us, it was a special formula one season, if you hate him, or love him, it doesn’t matter. We worked on a project together as a team, not as single persons. That’s our real secret. And now after the release, I’m really proud to be part of that team. Everybody gave his best, even if it means he has to work night and day, during illness or vacations, it doesn’t matter.  During the development some members left and some new came into the team. Lucky enough for us we got the right guys. Full of motivation, full of passion for that mod and with these new members our level increased again. So my special thank is directed to the “new guys”. But I should not forget the “old” members, which are at CTDP since we founded the team. We had hard times, and good times. This is good day for everybody in the Team.

Now here we are, after 2 years and a few month to show you, the community, what we have done during all the time you were waiting for this mod. We know it’s not perfect, but it was something special for us. We feel like a father seeing his child is leaving home to discover the world. And we all at CTDP hope, you discover all the lovely details of this mod.

So CTDP wishes you happy St Nicholas Day with CTDP F1 2006 modification for rFactor.

PSRTV coverage update

There were some technical difficulties with the RaceCast, so it’s delaying for about an hour. New start in 35 minutes at 7pm gmt. The page of the coverage at PSRTV is getting quite a load obviously and got a MySQL-failure, we hope they fix this soon, may happen any minute.

In the meantime, my colleagues and I are already warming up for the interview. I bet it’ll be fun.

We are also in the chat, although we won’t be chatting simultanously: This takes alot of attention.

Update 19:11 gmt: Qualifying 1 just started, however I heard the video is not yet up. They are working on it.

Update 19 36 gmt: Either the load on the server is alot higher than anticipated or an DDOS-attack is running on the server. Ian is rotating to get it working.

Bad news…..

Hi guys,

This time, we have some bad news for the community. We made a cool concept for our intro video, searched for music and had cool ideas. But in the past few weeks nobody had time to do it. We asked stabiz, he did some nice vids and he agreed to help us out. Then his pc crashed and now we don’t have an Intro for our mod now. We thought it would be cool to have one. So we decided to make the big package not bigger again for something 99% of you just watch 1 or 2 times. We’ll do a nice intro video with all our ideas after the release and take the time for it. It will be an extra download and can be downloaded if the user wants to have it.

Regarding Server Edition

It’s one of the questions we got the most during the last few days, so let me clarify it here.

There won’t be an Equal-physics aka Server Edition!

It’s a long discussion, that began when we release F1-2005 1.0 without SE, continued when we released with SE and is still up. Our opinion was, that the SE hurt the mod. We spent alot of time working out the indivudiual carphysics and we did so even more on the F1-2006 mod. SE destroys that.

At the end the discussion is about whether it’s worth building physics for every team. 10 years ago, this wasn’t the default and Simracers tried everything to get individual physics for each car. Today with multiplayer being a must this has changed. It’s no problem having unique physics for each car, but people want to drive F1, while degrading it to a standardized equal-car series. I could imagine the same peoples outcry when they hear plans for standardized components, engines and aerodynamic rules. But hey I get off topic. CTDP put alot of effort into the physics and we won’t castrate them.

On a technical node. We included so many team-dependatand variables in the physics, like the suspension-model and brakes-model, that it’s impossible to have equal-physics. At best “near-equal”-physics.

Next word goes to leagues. our stand on the issue is related to public servers and public downloads. For leagues we have the option to give out a “near-equal-physics” patch, on request. While we don’t endorse it in public racing, we see the necessity in league racing.

And finally just to clarify. The “Dedicated Server Edition” is the original mod without any textures and sounds. Thereby it’s “only” about 750mb big and can be installed on rF-Multiplayer-Server without taking up 4gb of hd space.

Update: With the release of version 1.2 of the 2006 mod, we introduced a tool to create your own equal-physics variant of the mod inherited by a car of your choice. Check out the mod deriver in rFactor/ModData/CTDP/CTDP06/mod_deriver/

Changelog for Release Candidate 2

The buglist is nearly empty. Some minor text-stuff which will be fixed in the next version. So the car polishing is nearly done. We dry our hands, but they remain sweety. Why is that?

CTDP F1 2006 Mod rF – Release Candidate 2
=========================================
– 0000201: [Cars] incorrect williams steering wheel (Afborro) – resolved.
– 0000432: [Installer] LeoFFB gets installed in the wrong directory (Neidryder) – resolved.
– 0000430: [Cars] Error on Williams Mirrors (Neidryder) – resolved.
– 0000429: [Cars] BMW Right Front Pivot Point (Neidryder) – resolved.