Development news

It feels like forever since I last updated my blog!

Last week, one of the main water pipe in our apartment broke down, and we had water under our floors over half the apartment.

Luckily, the apartment above us got free last July, so we were able to temporarily move a couple of things up while the repairs are done.

The floors are ripped, the bottom of the walls are opened, and it's drying out.  They should be coming over in a few days to redo the floors and finish up the repairs.

Sigh...  At least, we were lucky to not lose anything to the water.  But having two apartments, one with no locks on any doors or drawers, a staircase and a 3 years old little boy.. and you've got a nice headache!

As for the track, I haven't stopped, I can't anyway... otherwise I would lose the momentum...

I finished up the curbs all around track a few days ago, and I have went a little overboard with the polys... not that much tho, I had 3.8M poly, and I know I can load a 3.6M poly scene.  But I had no scenery, trees, etc... and this stuff takes roughly 800k-1M poly.  So I had to trim 1.2M or so from my curbs...

At first, it seemed like I would have to abandon the 3d curbs all around track, but then I looked into baking normal maps and this is what I have done.

I have highly reduced the poly count by removing the single or dual chamfers to round up things, and I have baked normal maps out of the higher poly curbs and use the normal map on a lower poly model.

I have redone all the extra curb models, except the main red/white one.  This one, I can pro-optimize to around 65-70% without losing any noticeable details... so I want to keep those looking as good as possible without needing some normal trickery.

The rest of the curbs objects are still 3d, and will still be able to remove the fake bump added on those, however, they won't look as good from all angles... but from most, it should look pretty similar, if not better in some case, since I improved the high poly model a bit for most models, and edited the normal maps with nDo, added a high resolution concrete grain from another gametextures.com texture I have, and masked it to the tiles only.

I have started to redo the curbs with the lower poly objects and I'm up to mutkurve now.  I had 3.8M poly on the full track, with all reference objects removed, and now I got 2.3M poly with all reference objects removed but I still have the gtr evo track and curb mesh... doesn't take that much, but still...

So it's looking good.  I think it will end up being a reality after all!

I have calculated about 500k poly for my guardrails, a little more with the tips I'll need to weld on the guardrail's ends.

So I might even be able to have some kind of 3d grass on the infield... still early to really tell, but we have a lot more chances now.

3D guardrails goodness!

Yesterday, after writing my 4096+ comment, I decided I would take a break from the curbs and model the guardrails.

Here is what I came up with:

These textures were made by Gametextures.com and were made to look similar to those with the com8 layout, which featured some rusty versions.  

These guardrails should be looking pretty neat in game!  I can't wait to see what the lighting engine will do to these guardrails at dusk/dawn settings! :)

EDIT:  I have shaped the guardrails entirely with my Quad Chamfers plugin.  Really neat plugin!  I'm using it a whole lot now.  Only the tip have been curved with an FFD box with a 2x48x2 box.  I added 4 edges near the end of both sides.  The straight section have no edges on the width side to keep poly as low as possible.  I wanted to model the holes and bolts, but it would have skyrocketed the poly count... I'll use the normal map that was made with the texture along with the alpha channel for the hole instead :)

Development news

Things are going great.  Progress is certainly slow, but it should be looking pretty darn good.

Here is the curb in hohenrain, along with the concrete part next to it.

One of the road drains...

The start and end of the curbs.  Managed to do them in 3d, and learned about the FFD box modifier and wow... wish I would have known about it earlier!

The dreaded kerbstones!  

And the X bricks near hohenrain.

We should be able to tell what we are riding on with our eyes closed now :)

Anyone got a working iPad 1-2?

Hey guys,

I'll cut the story short, but my girlfriend's iPad 2 is dying out.  The screen has lost touch on nearly half the screen, and it acts by itself more often than not.  The keyboard shows up and disappear, trying to type on it, and you need to rotate the iPad every few letters so you can get a spot that works.

The problem is, since she bought it like 3 or 4 years ago, well the year it came out, she has started to do stuff on it, with art studio, page, numbers etc for her work.  The place where she work is having a hard time as well, and her boss won't be able to buy her one.

I'm not asking for a new iPad either, but if any of you, or someone you know have changed his iPad 1-2 or whatever recently, and still have it, we would be very grateful for it.

As you can guess, my girlfriend is an exceptional person.  I don't know many women who doesn't share passion with computers/racing/gaming who would tolerate me putting that much into what I love doing.

The only way we could buy one ourselves is waiting for tax return next year, and this is a rather long wait... so if anyone is able to help, it would be greatly appreciated.

Reach me out via the contact form if you are in a position you can help.

Curbs looking spiffy in the editor!

I was curious to see how the curbs would look in the editor, so I exported a small segment of road, along with the curb and the part before the curb, and see how it looks.  Pretty stunning I must say!  The different time of day really shows a difference now.

I didn't thought about that before, but since the curbs have their own geometry, which differs of the road, and the beginning and end parts, it adds a bit of trouble, and will likely take me a lot longer than if I would have done them as they were before, but I believe the efforts will be worth it, don't you think?

Since there was no way I could connect the curbs to the road cleanly, I put the pivot point of the curb a little back, just a tiny bit, so it will sit a little over the road, as you can see, it doesnt really show up, and will save a lot of poly doing so.

I guess that's why the original was made like this!  With the curbs and stuff not connected and overlapped a bit.  I'm just too perfectionist and it bugs me... but I have no other choice now to do the same.  In the end, in game, it doesnt matter, but it's just that I like when things are clean and nicely made.. .stuff all connected.. but seems modelling for games requires some trickery!  Not that I modeled before for different purpose, but I suppose you don't have to resort to that kind of stuff when you are no really limited by poly count.

Development news

So far so good!

The cambers are done all around track, and closely match those of gtr evo.  Still need to interpolate a few bits, but overall, it's pretty good.  At first, I had no idea how I was gonna do it, so I found a way, but around halfway, I found a much better way of doing them, was going faster and a cleaner job, didnt need to interpolate as much.

I'm not sure if I'm gonna nail the two karussells right tho.  This is a lot more tricky, and I'm not certain how it's done from scratch.  So what I did was cut the karussel inside (the separate texture) and since it was pretty much the same size and shape as the original, I was able to conform it and do a few adjustments for the couple of verts that didn't conformed since they had no surface to conform.  

I have started work on the curb.  I'm currently modelling them so they will be 3d, and won't need fake bump added.  I have really liked the 3d curbs in the gp section, so I thought to tourist could use the same.

I am using the texture gametextures made for my other version.  Here is how they look.  Sorry for the low quality render, I don't know how to setup the rendering as I never had to.  But the texture should look much better in game.  If you have tried my rf2 version, you know how they looked :)

I will also do some research on how I could model the... I dunno how you call that, but the bricks as shown in adeneau or the inside of the karussel.  Since I have no really good texture for this, I thought it would be better to model it instead, and use a brick/concrete texture and ground/grass on the inside.

My finger is still pretty swollen, but it doesnt hurt as much on idle, and typing with my other finger on that same hand doesn't hurt no more, so that's why I was able to type this!  I can move it about 45 degrees.

So that's the news!  Anyone tried the new track mesh with mod cars?  Haven't heard anything yet... as they say, no news, good news?


EDIT:  Done with modelling the reference curbs and mapping each tile. There will be a lot of variations in the curbs now.

Actually, I'm having fun now!  Here are some sample of the concrete extension as found in hohenrain and lots of other places.

Won't be needing fake bumps no more!

The second style of concrete

I'm putting a plugin I bought a few months ago, when I was working the paddock area on the rf2 version, to good use.  Quad Chamfers from Marius Silaghi.  Actually, I got many of his scripts, lots of useful stuff in there.

It does much better chamfers than 3dsmax does.  A lot more options, and since its a plugin, it goes to the stack.

Something went wrong with the second concrete, had to redo it, and this time, I beveled the tiles a bit, I had forgotten to do it on the screenshot above.

Here is the "x bricks":

The first spline based Nordschleife available in the share!

Well!  I'm extremely pleased to announce that the first spline based nordschleife is now available.  Don't expect much, no shaders assigned, two textures, road and grass, no curbs, no nothing.. except the track and about 25-30 meters of grass on each side, no relief.

I tried the ferrari evo on it and the tatuus, the two cars from the defaults which had problems on the track before, and both drives perfectly on the new mesh.

So I'm letting it out early so you guys can throw all kind of cars at it and see how it goes.  Beware tho, there is no visual aids, so you will need to know the track like your back pocket to drive on it without falling past the wide patch of grass!

I'm not even sure if I'll be able to complete it, but I'm having a shot.

I know AC will probably have their own before I finish this up, but I'm now only interested in AC if you know what I mean.  I'd like to offer it to all current racing sims, if they wish to adapt it to their engine.  It's gonna be built for AC, so all in standard mats, so conversion to most engine should be easy... only rf2 will require a bit more to convert the mats, I'll need to check and see if there is a standard to gmat converter script... that would save a bunch of time.

So I'll keep you updated on the project.  And let me know how your mod cars handle on it.

EDIT:  I've done the width changes in the road, all that remains are the camber and both karussells.

Not quite the end...

Well, the dust have fallen, and I'm back to work.

Unfortunately, I can't type very well, I might have broken my left hand index finger, otherwise, its badly bruised.

Fortunately, working in max is easier...  so don't just stop visiting my blog yet... :)

The end

Well... I'm a bit pissed... I just don't understand how fucked up this whole world have gotten.  What am I doing wrong?  Ok, yeah, I'm taking stuff from a game, and make it available in another.  But this game we are talking about is dead.  I'm not charging anything for what I do, and even recommend to buy gtr evo, and know a few have bought it because of me.  So those are extra sales they wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

I even distribute the track to people owning gtr evo already, so what is the harm?  Anyone are free to convert the track if they own it, right?  For their own usage?  So I'm doing it freely for all those people, how is that any different than if everyone went about and converted their own version?

What I'm gaining in the process?  0 donations so far, and a little visibility.  And this is the main reason I'm doing this, I'd like to get noticed, but I doubt it will ever happen anyway, I just suck and can't create anything myself yet, and losing Nord also means I just lost all motivation to do this... cause I don't want to work on another track.  I've been working on this track (well nordschleife) for more than 1 year, and I'm still loving it as much, if not more.  My lap times are still improving regularly and no other tracks would offer me this level of replayability.

If I could sit with someone and go thru the process of creating something, I guess it would be enough for me to start something, but I just don't know where to start.  I tried many times to take the google earth mesh and do something with it, and I just don't know.

In case you think I was lying when I said I had the okay from Jay, here what he wrote me on August 2nd, as you can see, it wasn't the I, hereby, grant you bla bla bla kind of permission, but it looked to me more like a permission than an order to stop.

"I will not ask you to call back copies, and its ok to share with these people as long as they dont spread it outside your little circle. As a favor I would like you to ask those people the following question: Would they buy the AC Nordschleife DLC when it comes out even though they could use that one for free! And when they answer no, don't send them the anything anymore!"

From there, I emailed him twice, asking if it was okay if I would add more people to the circle providing they send me proof they own gtr evo, and he wasn't replying.  So I went ahead, and added the How to get access page.


On the 19, this is what he sent me:


"Sorry was away for a few days.

The thing i really want is to stop any and all conversions. I appreciate you take the effort of making things comfortable, but fact remains our content ends up in competitors games. And that to me is a chapter i want to close off as much as we can.

I hope you understand our stance in this all!

thank you in advance,

Best Regards,

Jay Ekkel"

So, yeah....  I'm fucking pissed.  They were certainly gaining more than I ever would have doing this.  SimBin started as a mod team, grew up on mods, as all their previous games were highly supported by the modding community, and yet, now they embrace the milk your customer model, or should I say free 2 play model, and turn their back to modding.  Yet, the community accept this behavior, and many still support what they do.

Oh, and just a thought regarding conversion vs scratch.  Why would someone make something from scratch for a company that doesn't give a fuck about you, and hardly ever acknowledge your work and at least thank you for it, let alone sending you a little something for it, knowing their game have more value because of the many things added from the community?  Honestly, the more I see clearly into this, the less I think any of those deserve anything made from scratch.  They get all the benefits, they sell more copies of their game, and what do people get?  A few end up working somewhere, and just how many end up burning themselves in the process and end up with nothing.

If you don't share my point of view, I don't give a fuck, and don't even bother commenting.  I'm out.

I will still go thru my emails and send out the BTSync keys to those who sent me their screenshots, and in a week or so, I'll stop my BTSync, letting time to everyone to sync one last time.

And my birthday is in 2 days.... happy birthday to me.

EDIT:  I just sent the keys to those who emailed me, if I missed you, as google kindly groups up some emails from different persons together, let me know.

v0.9 tourist/vln update ready!

Tourist

VLN

(You can get this awesome Civic and more nice cars here: http://malagoligarage.wordpress.com/category/cars/)

Well, that was a good week as well. Managed to get a lot done.
First, I'm sorry, I was a bit overwhelmed with emails last week end, so I didn't took my emails for the whole week, so I could concentrate on work a bit.

I hate cut and paste replies, so I was taking time to reply to everyone that reached me thru the contact form, but it was taking a lot of time.

So I started by adding grass to the gp area, and it wasn't an easy task.  The scene was already near maximum capacity for what 32 bit can handle, so I wasn't able to add grass as I wanted in the GP area and keep both the inside and hill grass in the tourist section.  So I removed the hill grass and I was able to cover the gp area properly, with a good density, and good coverage.

I also added some new miss grooves in corners of the gp area, as Kunos have done in their nurb track.

Fixed a couple of things as well, such as the missing billboards in the gp area, some texture mapping errors, added more specular to the drain in the gp area, things like that.

I also tuned the LODs some more. The track might even be smoother with the grass on than it was before.  You let me know.

For the tourist version, I took the vln mesh, imported the blocking tirestacks (that blocks the gp area), the timing objects, start, pit, etc.

This was easier than figuring all the changes I made in the tourist part, in the vln version, and setup shaders in the gp area (it wasn't done in the tourist version).  And it makes sure that both looks the same as well.

I removed the tents, cars, vans etc that are present in the vln version, as they shouldnt be there anyway.

I also redid the AI in the tourist version.  It is much harder now, and winning a race in the GT cars at 100% is going to be very challenging.  The AI laps on average 4 seconds quicker than my best lap in the bmw gt2, so it's pretty tough.

This brings us closer to a v1.0 release on both versions!

In the vln video, I ran out of gas at the end of the 2nd lap.  I managed to make it out to the finish line anyway, first time this happens to me!

I'll catch up with my emails later tonight or tomorrow, so if you sent me an email or screenshot of your steam library, hang tight, I'll answer you back.

Hello to all new brazilian fans!

Wow, I don't know what's happening today, but my blog's traffic is mostly coming from Brazil, and lots of people sending me their gtr evo proof to get the btsync keys.

So hello to all new brazilians fans!  Hope to meet you guys (and everyone else, of course) on the new multiplayer server.

If anyone could help by dedicating a more powerful server to it, it would be awesome, I can't have more than 8 cars running, and the server may lag while my btsync is active.

Multiplayer Server Online!

I have managed to configure a server on my computer and just tested it myself, and successfully joined the practice session.

The server name is easy to find, the name is Nordschleife VLN 0.55, just search for vln.

Not sure if I will keep it running, and I dunno if I would run it 24/7, but we'll see.  Come and join me for some practice sessions!  No racing planned yet.

VLN v0.55 update in the share

Well, that was a good week.  Managed to do a whole lot more than I thought I would.

All the shaders are configured as the rest of the tourist, made all necessary spec maps, the race surface is smoothed out, increased poly, remapped and retexture with very little seams.  I had a little problem coming around the lap, when the pit lane starts, but its now covered up with the grooves layers, so it doesn't shows up anymore.

The timing objects, pit and start boxes are all set up.

Today, I managed to do both the AI and replay cameras as well as a proper sections.ini.

The AI should be a real challenge to most drivers out there, I would think.  I improved considerably on this layout since I did the first tourist AI, so if you were struggling with the tourist AI, you will definately want to lower this one a couple of notches.

As you can see in the video, I gave my everything trying to beat the AI once I let him pass me at start, and never was able to.  Horribly crashed near the kleines karrusell.  He did not got away from me much, at times he was pulling a bit, then I would close up a bit, stayed overall rather equal to him until the end.  I will need to sharpen my skills some more in order to beat this new ai.

So you can expect a tourist update soon.  I'll fix the road texture that's too stretched on the length side, I tiled it some more on the vln, since I noticed it was kinda stretched.  I'll update the AI, and update the sections.ini to the gtr evo layout.  It's still the one I took from the other nord.

I'll need to make the grass on the vln layout, and we will have v1.0 of both tourist and vln.

EDIT:  I typed this last night so it would be ready when the video would be online etc, but I have made some little changes since, hence v0.55.

I have detached all curbs objects to materials, and assigned a separate feedback for the 3d curbs, so the engine will not add rumble effects on top.

I have also removed the feedback effect on the turf and green parts, and assigned wall physics to the chicane posts, and the tirestacks in the position grid.

Development news

Well, I'm happy to announce that the vln and 24h will be a reality afterall.  On monday, I was trying to get the gp surface up to par a bit, and replace the default texture with the one I'm using elsewhere.

However, the spline mapping went horrible with the default track mesh, and I tried to replace the texture packaging it more closely as the original was, and the groove inside the texture itself made the tiling horrible.  Since there was more details in the replacing texture, it also revealed many spots were the tiling wasn't contiguous and basically it just looked real bad.

After applying a strong high pass filter to the texture, I was able to get rid of the groove mostly, and then it became alright.

However, I had a real problem mapping the groove.

So I was bummed out, cursing at myself not knowing what to do, and I started writing a post about it, saying I wasn't skilled enough to move on... but I didn't published it.  I knew next morning would come, and I would look into it again, and maybe find a solution.

The original track mesh had a lot of tris since the design of the corners are more complex than those in nord, so I overhauled all the surface and made it all quads.  Then the spline mapping went just right.

Took a bit of time, but I made it thru.  So I was also able to map the grooves as well.  The surface is also smoother to drive on.

Here is a lap on it with the e30 group a.

The trees and treelines are also fixed, I had it done before working on the surface.

Now I'll need to get the curbs and materials up to par with the rest, replay cameras, ai and grass, and it should be pretty good!

The whole surface is done btw, so doing the 24h layout will require even less time to do.  Basically new corner grooves (the base is all around track), new replay cameras and ai and that's it.

Interested in creating a Nordschleife only league?

Anyone would be interested in creating a Nordschleife only league with me?

As most of you know, I pretty much only run the nordschleife, and I recently thought about creating a league that would exclusively run the nordschleife, but with different cars.

Every week, during week days, we could run hotlaps mostly, try out different cars, and pick one to use for the week end race, and ideally practice with it during the week.

We could share setups, tips, and look to improve each other during week days.

I also thought about having handicaps to make things more interesting with races with different cars and skill levels.

So the fastest people could run some slower cars while those having more problems could run faster, grippier cars.  As long as lap times are about the same, and it gives good competition, it should be real interesting.

I have started to run races with the AI, where I take a slower car and run with the faster one, one on one, and its bunch of fun!

I did a ktm (I had the ktm) vs ferrari f40 stage 3, and it was a good race.  The AI managed to stay rather close to me, so it was able to pass me on the dottinger hohe when we were coming back on it, end of first lap, and he took a considerable gain before schikane.

Let me know what you think, we could run both the tourist and soon to come 24h :)

The 24h has opened it's door, and is in your BTSync folder!

Finally, everyone can rejoice!  I have been asked for a while for this, and now it's happening!

Since I got the nordschleife track to a pretty decent level, I thought it would be nice to expand and include the 24h as well.

So if you bought gtr evo to get the tourist, your money hasn't been spent in vain!  You will be able to race both tracks in AC as well now!

Ironically, I have started working on this about 24h ago... :)  I imported the 24h meshes from gtr evo, isolated the difference between what I had and what was in the 24h layout, and merged both together, so I didn't have to do the nordschleife again.

I did a quick tuning of the shaders, nothing fancy yet, just wanted to have something still pleasant to look at while checking it out in game.

The road mesh is particularly good, actually, I think it doesn't need any work.

At the moment, as you can figure, the AI, cameras, track map, grooves, etc, are all coming from the tourist, so you can only hotlap for the moment, but I thought I would release it as is, so you can enjoy it for the rest of your sunday, if you are lucky to be at home! :) or unlucky depending how you see it!

If tim_olol would be super kind again and make a nice track map as he did for the tourist layout, it would be awesome!  I need to learn the track, and this would be really helpful!  I have never ran the 24h layout before, and have only ran the nurb track a bit when I started playing AC a bit more, but ended up lapping on Mugello and Vallelunga before I converted Nord.

Can anyone please tell me how to figure the IN and OUT values for the sections.ini and cameras.ini?  I have tried to search google and the AC forums for this, and found nothing.

In the editor, the two set in and out button don't do anything for me, and only set it to -1.  Yeah, I know, I already did the cameras.ini, right?  But since I couldnt find any info, I went by trial and error... and I came to a point where I was getting it within 3-4 tries... sometimes less.  But I don't which to do the sections.ini and cameras.ini this way, there must be an easier way than this.  I look at the default .ini that comes with the stock tracks, and values have lots of numbers after the dot.

I have also imported the collision mesh as I didnt knew AC needed one... so I have turned out physics on the guardrails and enabled them on the collision walls.  Colliding with guardrails should be better now.

EDIT::  Here is an onboard lap since the replay cameras don't work yet.

Recommended AC Settings for best results

After playing a bit with the video settings in AC, I have come to realize that some have a pretty big impact on the track's look.
¸
Here are the settings I find optimal:

The most important one, is to set AA to 2x, you will see why in a few.

As for the effects tab, I prefer the look with post processing on, and I'm not after a blown hdr look, so saturation 70% makes it very realistic to me, my monitor is set in srgb mode.

This is a matter of preference really but if you like sober look, you should give this a try, if you arent already using something similar.

Here are the differences between some settings:

Same settings as above, no AA

 The trees are opaque, and pretty rough.

Same settings as above, 2X AA

 The trees are perfect.  Opaque and smooth.

Same settings as above, 4X AA

 The trees are highly transparent (distant ones), smooth.

Same settings as above, 8X AA

 The trees are less transparent than 4X AA, also smooth.

Same settings as above, 2X AA, no FXAA

Not much difference, everything is a bit crisper.  My personal preference is with it on.  But I haven't looked at the differences elsewhere on the track, my opinion could change, as it often do :)

Same settings as above, 2X AA, No Post-Processing

Not much to say, only the coloring change :)

If you are tight on performance, disabling mirrors and lowering reflections settings should be your first stop before lowering anything else.  Unless you race outside the car, the reflections, specially with low fov, dont make up for much.

Enjoy!

v0.32 update in the share

After reducing the AA from 8x to 4x, I didn't noticed right away the trees, as I was focusing more on the grass, but they were more transparent at a distance than they were at 8x.

And it bothered me much, as 8x was a bit too much for my system, with dips in the 20s fps.

Racing AI was out of question as well.

When I turned back AA on a week or so ago, when I posted on my blog about it, and how nicer the trees were with it at 8x (albeit a bit transparent), I first tried 4x, and it wasn't looking great, but the trees showed improvement in the way the mask appear.. so I tried 8x, and it was better, so I assumed 2x would be worse than 4x and didnt tried.

I gave 2x AA a try, and to my surprise, the trees were just perfect.  they were not transparent anymore, and were smooth as well.  However, the road dust and skybox looked horrible.

But this I knew the fix... I have fixed the trees, and most alpha mask in the track, but must have overlooked these.

The original mask simbin did at the time didn't seems to work good in the ac engine, the mask was lacking contrast, seems AC displays stuff better with a crisper mask than a blurry one.

Specially without alpha blending.

So I fixed both skybox and road dust, and raised the dust at the entry of quiddelbacher hohe, it was sticking a bit in the tarmac.

I also re-positioned the start and pit objects so the cars fit in their boxes now.

Also ran the 3d grass texture with an high pass filter, further reducing the darkness at the bottom of the texture, as stated by kill_em_all :)

I originally went with shadow/highlight, but high pass made it even better.

The optimizations to LOD have paid off big time, prior to doing it, and prior to grass, I could barely run the AI anymore, as I often had the 95% cpu usage overlay, and the game lagged a lot during that time.  Specially after I added the grooves.

Now, with all the grass on, I can race and record a replay with 6 AI (first number I tried actually, so I dunno how much I can run, but doubt I would make it to 12-15... but who knows...)

I stopped the race at the first lap cause I didn't had the time to run the 2nd one :)

Regarding the race, I had a very good start, and cleared out the red arrow in my screen before the first turn, starting from 2nd position.

So I thought I would have it easy, and the arrow wasn't there until the entrance to flugplatz... then I realized they were still rather close... (playing with no mirrors) so I became a bit nervous for a while, then opened up a can of whupass and had 8 seconds between the 2nd at the finish line :)

AI is set at 100%.

I'm actually surprised to see how good the AI is in AC.... specially considering they had no AI in netkar, and no AI at start... so it's rather in an early stage, and yet, they are pretty darn good, and race cleanly and very humanlike.

The AI trying to pass me at flugplatz shows this well.  So far, the AI never had me crash in AC...

I also tried for the 3rd or 4th time to fix the part in flugplatz that makes the ferrari evo's front hit the tarmac, and I still can't make it go away.

I tried multiple relax, multiple mesh smooth, turbosmooth, flow connect and another plugin I bought, and I can make it a tad better, but not even worth making an update with it.

Since it is the only car doing this, I will leave it like this.. if someone can suggest me something, I will give it another try, but I'm out of clues for now.

If we could lift the suspension on that ferrari a bit, it would be fine, but we can't...

Looking at the problem carefully in a replay, and you see the front wing hit the tarmac, then it bounces the car up, and often, if you are coming fast enough, the front wheel lift off, and you loose traction in the front wheel for a brief moment, ending up in the guardrail to the right.

Looking at the mesh from all angles trying to show find any roughness, but I don't see anything out of place.

There could be something wrong with the car suspension settings as well...so I don't mind so much for now.

v0.31 update in the share

I have made the new share, and made two actually.  One will contain the latest version, and the other will contain a few archived versions, in case you don't like the latest, can't run it, or whatever.  And I have sent the keys to all those that sent me their proof on the AC forums.

After tuning the LODs, the track is now a lot smoother.  I have dropped my 8x AA to 4x, with no apparent visual degradation, and the track now runs between 50-60fps for the most part, going into 40s at times.

As you can see, (will see, the video is uploading to youtube atm) the recording with fraps went smooth with no laggy parts.

I have also fixed the two tree trunks (for two different kinds of trees), that went bad during the tree conversions.  They had the leaf texture instead of the bark.  They are now fixed.

Since a few bark texture are right into the tree texture, instead of being separate, I could not assign a different shader settings, so a few trunks were appearing too bright because of this.  I have made those separate mat from the foliage now, so I was able to tone them down a bit.

A very solid release I think.

The other versions will follow depending on the comments I get on this one.  If everyone is able to run it, no need to do them, but otherwise, I could add a version with only the inside grass and/or no grass.

EDIT:  Sorry for the slow transfer speed right now, I'm uploading the video to youtube as well.  It is estimated to complete in 2 hours.  Hang on!

v0.31 video

Here is what the track looks like with full grass on.

As you can see, it's like a brand new nord!

I have kept my video settings the same so you can have an idea of the performance hit.  As you can see, it got laggy a bit at times, but overall, it is very good.  Keep in mind recording with fraps adds an overhead.

Also, the track had 0 lod optimizations.  Turns out the engine doesn't do it by itself.  Up till now, everything was set to 0, and I assumed the engine dealt with it loding stuff as needed, cause the performance was nice anyway.

Turns out I was wrong, and the engine doesn't do it.  Some people mentioned the entry to fuschrohre was lagging on some hardware, and I started to experience it with the full grass on.

So I started to optimize stuff, and on my system, it doesn't lag no more entering fuschrohre.  It's is also smoother all around track for me, so I guess it should be quite noticeable for everyone, and might allow people who couldnt have played with the grass on otherwise.

Now I need to make some blending grass lines at the bottom of a few hills that doesn't have guardrails, add the guardrails grass clumps all around track, as it's been done only on the dottinger hohe and the hill grass that spills.

I will also look to add some wild flowers here and there.

An update should be ready for the upcoming week end, hang tight :)

Make sure you have plenty of time this week end cause it will be a one of a kind nord experience :)

The number of polys as seen in this video is 5.6M (tris, from 3dsimed report)

Development news

Well, we might just be able to get grass on the hills as well.

Today, I have finished up the hills around track to the same density I showed you, and after finishing and splitting objects, and spending like 15-20 mins to import (its now crazy long), the editor crashed.

I have removed the section from ex-muhle to steilstrecke, and the editor was able to load the 260mb .fbx file.

At 280mb it crashes.  With full grass, I was up to 300mb, and after removing the stretch I just mentioned, I tried to find out if I could keep it and skim elsewhere, and wasn't able to skim to reach 260mb.

So I'm giving it one last shot.  I'm just stubborn.  This time I'm using quite a bit less grass to do so.  I wanted to do a gradient like effect in my grass before, but didnt quite managed to do it properly, but I found out how now.  So only the bottom, where usually the inclination is steeper, is more dense, then it starts to fade a bit, so it cuts quite a bit in the poly usage.  Using somewhere around 33-50% less poly, so I think I should be able to give a generous coverage as I previously did and be able to load it up.

Don't worry, I'll release 3 versions, a grassless, another with the inside grass only, and the ultra grass version for people with beefier computers.

I'm also adding a slim line of longer grass around the guardrails as well, but not nearly as dense as the regular grass, so there is a lump of grass here and there clumping on the guardrails.

Then I'll look to add some wildflowers here and there, think it would add a lot to the visuals.  I know I've spotted white and purple ones around the real track, but I havent looked carefully for those yet.  I know I've seen some purple flowers around the inside of the kleines karussell.

If you are familiar with this, let me know which color of flower I should be looking to add.  Kind would be nice, but I'm not sure I will be able to match exact kind.  Colors would be good enough I think.  As long as its wildflowers and not growing in tropical regions, we should be fine :)

Some good, some bad and some awesome news!

I'll start with the bad news first, to the joy of a few and the disappointment of many, SimBin have emailed me and asked me to stop working on the conversion.

To make it short, after an email with Jay, he was kind enough to allow me to continue working on it, and even update the people that sent me a prrof they own gtr evo.

While I would have liked for them to see an opportunity rather than an IP infringement, but at least I'm happy they were open enough to come to this with me.

I'm sorry I was a bit too quick, but I really thought, the fact there was 1 mil gtr evo key going on soon after I came up with it, I thought the two had some sort of link, and made the key public thinking SimBin would probably not mind.

This happened on friday, so that's why the BTSync key link was removed from the blog.  

I have asked Jay if I could add new gtr evo owner to the BTSync circle, and will probably get a reply about my second email monday, as when I replied the first time, I got an out of office automated message...  so I was lucky to get a reply before the weekend.

So this sums up the bad and good news.

Now what's the awesome?

I have updated lots of mats with some better (much better) shaders.  I have worked a good bit on the curbs and all concrete stuff next to the road.  I used some detail maps of the nurb track, and it really makes a nice difference.  

But that isnt the awesome yet ;)

After having the track look much better with the shaders, I thought I should now give the inside grass (before the guardrails) a try... 

So I grassed up all the track and without trying before finishing, I splitted the objects, edited the normals and exported, and the kseditor crashed.  So I decided to give the 4gb patch that Quadriga Corse told me about not long ago, and guess what, it worked.

Then I was thinking, how about the other grass I did a few days ago... and again, it worked.  The fbx file is now 200mb, and the kn5 nearing 500mb, and it works!

I haven't seen much performance hit from only the niside grass, but adding the other brings it down a little.  I can still play without lowering settings tho.

Some that were already tight will definately not be able to run it, at least well, might be able to run it for screenshots, but those with medium end hardware and better should be fine.

As a reference, I got a rather modest Phenom II x4 965, 8gb generic ram, and a gtx580 1.5gb.  

I run with almost everything maxxed out, 1920x1080, 8x AA (just turned it on a few days ago, and it makes the trees like... almost photorealistic, unless you are real close to it, there is really a huge difference, and surprisingly, very little performance hit for me, as I'm bottlenecked by cpu anyway) but I have mirrors off and everything related to them, since I don't see them mostly anyway at 35 fov.  Also have the reflections at low and 1 cubethingy.  HDR on, etc.

So anyone with similar or better hardware should be fine

Now I haven't got all the grasss in yet, so there is a possibility I was already close to the limit and I won't be able to finish it up.. but at least I got the inside grass in.

As a cherry on top, I did a third layer of grooves, and highlighted the corners only with this one, and made the other running all around track less opaque.

Here are a few screenshots showing how it would look like with both grass in :)

Now wipe off the drool :P