James ‘juluka’ Bendy has been busy this summer. Or rather his kids kept him busy. Well actually his kids kept him out of his basement and occupied his computers playing World of Warcraft. Finally school begins again, he is back at work and the result of this weekend are these to helmets of Frentzen and Alesi.
There are a few trends that are hard to avoid and you have have to embrace them at one point. CTDP comes into the social networks… to take over the world.
We have established beachheads in Facebook and Twitter and are preparing our invasion.
CTDP on Facebook
CTDP at Twitter
We will be posting more frequent small updates. WIP shots will be found there first.
To be the first to get all information, we suggest to follow us there and subscribe our devblog via RSS.
On average you will be notified about 3-4 days before the news hit VirtualR and another day before any other news blogs pick it up. 😀
Despite the new ways, we are still available on the established ways.
Use the forum to ask questions and get help support for our Mods. We suggest to post any technical questions there, so the google can find it and anybody else can find the answer to the question.
If you have questions of more private nature please use our contact form.
For informal contact check out our members lists in facebook and twitter.
Had you already subscribed us in the social world, you would have seen this Jordan WIP shot already 4 days ago:
Marvin Fröhlich released version 1.3.0 of his rfDynHUD overlay-plugin for rFactor. This is mainly a maintenance release, however there have been some cleanup and some changes to the Widget-API. Widgets written for version 1.2.x may not work and should be updated. We urge third-party authors to update their widgets. Please report any problems you encounter in our forums.
rfDynHUD is Open Source and licensed under GNU Public License V2. Contact Marvin for access to the source code. Please remember the license does not allow commercial redistribution!
For the past year, we had Eric ‘ennisfargis’ Tozer working on the next version of the Bahrain International Circuit. This would include the 2010 layout and some major improvements on the tracks elevations and ultimately it would convert the track for rFactor2 once that is available. This work proved to be rather tedious as it is very hard to get hands on proper elevation data. Consumer GPS data is not exact enough and so we compiled height data from many different sources and are in the process of updating the track accordingly.
Fortunately for Eric, unfortunately for us, he got the foot in the door with Reiza Studios and won’t be able to continue his work on the track. This leaves the track in a work in progress state with nobody in the team to pick it up.
We are therefore looking for interested track modelers to get in touch with us to work on this track and help convert it to rFactor2. The track was a big success and it would be a shame not to bring it to the new platform. A lot of work has been done and we will provide help to step into the existing project as good as possible. Still you will need to know the basics of track editing, FFD modifiers and track exporting.
As with our other projects. CTDP is a dynamic team with people coming and going. With the death of rFactor and the continued waiting for rFactor2 we had more people disinterested in modding lately and therefore encourage everyone who has dome some modding and would like to continue and work in an organized, collaborative and enjoyable atmosphere to get in touch with us and see how you can help on the continued development of Bahrain Circuit and 1994.
The easiest way is to register and post in our forum, or to send an email in our contact form.
Thank you, Eric, for you contributions and wish you good luck at Reiza!
Andreas ‘Neidryder’ Neidhardt was just showing around some WIP shots of the 1994 Jordan, when we realized, we never posted any shots of the current car here in the blog. This needs to change.
The car was original modelled by Marco ‘BMWFan’ Büttner and is one of those we decided to keep and build upon. After some thorough reviews Neidryder took over to update the model and bring it up to standards. This involved heavy work on the main chassis: proportions, airbox and rear end. The latter is still work in progress as you can see in one of the shots. The suspensions are also just placeholders and will be replaced in the upcoming weeks. Lastly, the joint lines will be added to the model.
Once the model is done it will receive an updated mapping and one of the painters (maybe even myself) will update the existing textures to the model.
With this post we will start a new blog series called “inside F1 1994”. This blog series will show you some interesting technical aspects of the formula one season of 1994.
Today in inside F1 1994, we want to shone some light on the early season suspension using the brand new modeled Ferrari 412T1 from our modeler Erale.
As with most cars running a high nose, the lower front wishbones locate on to a central point to tidy up the under-nose airflow. Hower, unlike other system which are attached using a pair of closely-positioned uni-ball joings, 
Ferrari designer John Barnard actually links the wishbones using a male/female joint on the knife-edges, reaping the benefits of increased stiffness. The drawing also shows how Barnard has been able to locate the master cylinders inside the chassis bulkhead, by already working to the 1995 regulations. Ferrari also ran a third front suspension configuration at Imola with the secondary dampers encased in a metal cradle. Again, increased stiffness appears to be the main benefit, along with more predictable damper movement.
Trying to reproduce the 1994 cars as close as possible we tried to recreate the suspension, a very significant part of the model, as good as possible according to our reference pictures/drawings. We have a thread in our internal forum to show progress and discuss upcoming issues or a lack of references.
Erale made a few screenshots in 3ds Max and Andreas T made comparison pictures to show what erale modeled accurate and what needs to be changed.
Here is the final outcome:
The accuracy of the suspension is not only important for the model, but also for the simulation of the suspension geometry in rFactors physics.
Time for some new WIP shots. Stefan ‘erale’ Triefellner has been busy building the new Ferrari model. The model has been in development over the past 3 months. After our extensive reviews we deemed the existing Ferrari model not accurate. Updating the as we do with other models became more time-consuming than building a clean new model from scratch. After all we have all models, measurements and as it is important to get the proportions right, this was the way to go. The basic model is finished, erale is currently working on the details, joint lines and suspension.
More screens will be on the way soon.
It’s been a while since our last update. This has several reasons. With rFactor1 quite outdated and rF2 not really on our horizon and summer comming in europe, our motivation is currently not as high as it was during the F1 2006 development. Nevertheless the inner core of the group continued working on this mod, slowly but steady. Here is some of the work we did the past month.
First thing is the helmet shape. Our 2006 helmet shapes were done by Eugenio Faria who did a great job on them. But for 1994 we needed something completely different. We took the Senna helmet as reference and created a pretty nice looking shape. As it was our first own helmet to model we ran into a few difficulties during the modeling process as well as during creating the mapping.
To be prepared for rFactor 2 and its animation capabilities we also created a complete new, rigged, driver model. We will present that later when we have something more to show than the blank model.
James (Juluka) and Dennis (mediocre) already started painting the 94 helmets. (These are just screengrabs from Maya)
One final note about the mod and its platform. We are aiming to bring this mod as a rFactor2 mod. But we’re still looking around for other possibilities. We don’t know enough about rF2 yet and with another Simbin game coming (the gt game announced a while back) we’re still not sure which platform is going to make it. We’ll decide that as soon as rF2 or other promising platforms are available.
… of 2010. This morning we released version 1.2.0 of rfDynHUD. The new version addresses many bugs and brings many long requested new features. Check out the changelog for the full list. Read the full news on our homepage.
rfDynHUD is now Open-Source under the GPL v2. The source code is available for everyone contacting us. The new release also includes a SDK for creating your own widgets.
The other day I felt like Steve Purcell. On our last team meeting, I was pointed to Jürgen Wellbrock who is crazy fan enough to tattoo our logo on his back.
We salute you in gratitude and promise not to change our logo in the foreseeable future. 🙂