Development news

Well, screw that!  The perfectionist in me has taken over already :)

I don't wanna start this thing half assed and start over in the middle of it because I screwed up like last time.

The original mesh is quite bad actually.  Not nearly as much as the com8 version, that is sure, but a lot worse than I would have first expected.

There is a few shading errors here and there, nothing like the other mesh, and they are already fixed.  There was a chamfer around some mountain that went by unnoticed.  Someone must have hit the button and not notice it.  :)

Other than that, you might have noticed a few polygons where the shading wasn't totally smooth, well, that is because when I exported from 3dsimed to 3dsmax, all the smoothing groups were lost.

I applied smoothing group to the landscape, but since the pieces weren't connected together, it didn't resulted in a good smoothing.

Here is what it looks like at the moment (in the current versions I did up to now)

And after I merged everything that consist of ground, so grass, road, curbs, etc... and welded verts

I did a render so you would see a bit better than the shading I have in the viewport, but it's clearly noticeable in the viewport as well.

The reason why it is still jagged a bit is because the whole terrain is made of tris... not quads, so it doesn't make as smooth a landscape, but uses a lot less polys to do so.  Which is a good idea since this map has a lot more to it than the com8 one.  The middle is filled and the outside extends further.

So yeah, I will do exactly as I did with the other mesh, merge everything together, and work on it as a whole.  It will produce a much better result and there will be no cracks at all, unless I miss a few in the process of fixing them.  But once everything will be properly made and connected, detaching things won't produce any cracks.

So I have restarted from my quadrified road Max file, and merged it all, and I'm now quadrifying the quad corridor in between the huge tris mesh.  The part that is on both side of the road, up to the guardrails or so...

Comparison between GTR Evo and Google Earth meshes

Here is a quick video I recorded showing both GTR Evo and the google earth mesh I was talking about.

As you can see, it is highly accurate, with every hills and mountains being where they should.

Keep in mind, the google earth mesh is a ton more detailed and have over 1M polys...  but if you observe when I raise the gtr evo mesh quick and drop it down, the landscape is more than similar!  It's strikingly similar!

Thought you would be interested in seeing this :)

Here is what you are driving on!

To fully appreciate the mesh you guys are driving on, I think you have to see it for yourselves, you will better understand:

Here is the original evo road mesh, once quadrified only.  As you can see, the polys in the straight are huge, more than 10m in size for the largest, and those in corners are much smaller, around 2m in size depending on the corner.


This is the new road mesh:

As you can see, I went to great extent to make sure the polys are as evenly spread out as possible.

I did the length edges first, so when I did the width one after, I was eyeballing on the edges in the middle of the road to make out square polys as much as possible.  At some point however, I noticed the road width was changing, and if I kept on doing square polys in the areas the road got larger, I would have ended up with polys more than 1m in size, and I wanted to be around 0.6-0.8.. so they are this size for most of the road, going up to 0.9ish or so... never sampled an edge above 1m.  0.94 was max I believe.

This surface will work wonders with the rf2 grooves later on ;)  My previous rf2 surface wasn't optimal for grooves.


For reference, here it is in its latest form:

This was done by applying a large scale mesh smooth on the road surface and a tessellate after.  Much quicker, but....  it is what it is.  But I didn't knew better back then!

v0.18 in the BTSync folder

I think I got the brightness to a good level now.  It looks fine to me at all times of day, dawn, midday and dusk.

I've further lowered the trees before making the update.  I ran a lap before packing, and found out some trees were still too bright, so now I think it's pretty good.

Now, don't forget, they aren't lit as a sphere, so they are evenly lit, and the shading we see comes from the texture itself.

If I go any further than this, things will be near black at other times of day.

Here are some screenshots at different times of day:

8:00

10:00

12:00

16:00

18:00

So what do you think?

And in this update, the curbs have been raised from Antoniusbusche to Nordkhere.  (From the 1st corner in hotlap mode, to the last corner of the gp overlap area)

Development news

After exchanging some messages with a few people, I have come to realize that v0.17 is still too bright a bit.

I will fine tune things a little more.

And I've also started to work on the curbs as well, just finished raising the first one (well, as I always start my editing laps at the paddock) at antoniusbusche.

Guess how much I had to raise the damm thing before it started to look like in the real life picture I'm trying to match?

A whopping 8 cm...  I dunno how tall it was before, but I would think it doubled in height...

Here is how it looks:

Fortunately, Richard from the ISI forums have sent me a while ago reference pictures of the track, so I will be able to do a pretty good job I think on these curbs.  

What do you think?  Does it looks about the same height to you?

v0.17 update available on the new BTSync share

So, since I haven't heard much about your preferred method of distribution, I will go with BTSync.  Simply because it will be easiest for me, and you all in the long run.  Sure you have to install something on your computer, but after 5 mins, you are setup and running, and you can forget about it.

As soon as I will release an update, your BTSync will pick it up and you will have it a few mins later.  Can't be beaten any other way :)

Given the rate at which I might release updates, this will be a lot easier for me to publish my updates, simply moving a file into a folder on my computer, and you guys have it.

If you want the BTSync key, please re-send me your Steam screenshot on the AC forum, or by email, if you find it on this blog page somewhere, I'm not sure if it shows.  I won't obviously post it here.

I ask you resend the screenshot because some people otherwise might have tried to just send me a message on AC, and since I sent rather a few download links so far, it would have been hard to know if I already sent you one or not.

Just wanna do things properly and keep it fair.  

But once you will get the BTSync key, and installed it on your computer, no more messing around, you will automatically get all updates easy and quick.

Let me know if you need help setting up BTSync.

You can download the BTSync app here: http://www.bittorrent.com/sync

EDIT:  Check your pms at the AC forums, I have sent everyone the BTSync key, that sent me a screenshot already.  I decided to not be lazy and go thru my inbox and do it for you :)

Done working with the brightness

I believe I went over just about everything now.  Even found stuff that were still at their default settings! :)

I also set the tatoo, sand overlays and also the road edges to alpha blended.. so it looks much better this way.

Without any more wait, here is a lap in the Pagani Huayra with the v0.17 version at 1h30pm:

Let me know what you think, I will send the archive later to mega... or maybe setup a dropbox share right away so it's easier to manage.  I'll see!  Hearing your thoughts would help me decide what to do tho :P

Working on the brightness levels

You guys were pretty much all agreeing on the brightness being too much, specially around noon.

I also had this problem in rFactor 2, my favorite time to race is dusk or dawn, so I hardly ever race around noon or so.  Unless I start early and with time acceleration.

The thing is, as I'm setting things, I remember stuff that people once told me, like how bright the sun can be etc, and white highlights under bright sun, etc, so I was pretty much after this type of look.

However, when someone sent me two screenshots, one on a Kunos track, and one on mine, around the same time, I understood clearly :)

So I have lowered the specular values and some ambient and diffuse values a bit, and I have to agree, it's much better :)  Both at noon and dusk/dawn.

Still not finished, I keep on seeing a thing or two that pops out...

I also set the tatoos and sand overlays on the grass to alpha blended instead of AT.  The result is staggering :)  The sand over grass dont look that bad anymore, it's better blended and isn't fully opaque either, so it turns out pretty good considering how bad they looked!

I remember back in rF2, those things were the same, they looked horrible with alpha chroma and looked good with alpha transparency.

I will probably have an update with those changes in tomorrow, if anyone interested, once you see the video, let me know.

Any thoughts on how we could keep the distribution simple regarding updates?

I have thought about a dropbox share, but that would imply that you guys all have dropbox?  What do you think... BTSync could work well as well.

Let me know what you would like.

About videos of the track on Youtube

You can send videos of the track to YouTube if you wish, but I would ask you to put up the screenshot of GTR Evo you sent me at the start of the video, for the time being.

You can of course blur your username, as long as you show the GTR being in your library, I guess that should do it.

It's a little more troubles, but it might help SimBin approve or tolerate the whole project in the long run.

Lap video of the v0.16

Here is how the track looks at the moment:

The video was recorded at 6pm.

I still need to get used to the cars and new layout, still not at my best!   But it is recorded live, so it adds to the stress, I didn't wanted to start over bunch of time to get the best lap I could :)

The track might not be that much different in terms of layout, but it changes a lot how you get in and out of the corners you are used to.

Moving to a new home

I will continue posting development progress on this blog page.

Just opened it, so I'll need to do some customization to it, but don't expect much, I wanna spend my time working on the track instead of the blog itself.

If you happen to have a copy of GTR evolution and wish to have access to the track as it is developed, please send a screenshot of your steam library showing GTR Evolution and I will send you the download link to the current version.

If you have any questions, comments, general feedback, let me know.