Thursday, July 31, 2014

v0.29 in the share

Groovier!

The groove is now closer to what would be the fast path on the track.  It is not perfect, but again, each car will lap around the track differently, so even if I would match it for a given car, it might not be what another car drives..  I dont believe there is any places that is way off.

I also applied the mask of the main groove on top of the tire mark mask.. The marks where covering the whole width of the track... now they follow the groove.

I have fine tuned some specular settings, the guardrails and some concrete stuff, made them a tad more reflective.

The road texture have been swapped with the one from the nurb track.

Gave the skybox a little more ambient light, since I had forgotten to raise it back a bit when I made everything else brighter when I did the trees.  It is now appearing more closely as it should.

I've checked the gametextures website, and their prices have changed since.

However, the prices are still fair and roughly the same.  There is now a specified number of requests.  When I joined, there was no such thing.  So I was able to get more than I would now for the price.

So I would get the 30$ per month sub, which give me 2 requests per month.  I would probably need to subscribe for at least 5-6 months to get some 10-12 requests.  Not sure exactly how many we would need but it would be a start.

The pricing I had before was 79$ per month, for unlimited download per month, and texture requests (no limit mentioned, but they can only do so many in a month anyway).  So I was expecting to subscribe for 2-3 months at that price to get everything done.

So I've added a poll and we'll see how many of you are interested in pushing the track to the next level.

In the meantime, I'll see what I can recycle from the nurb track (obviously, no trees)...if I can skip a few textures requests all the better!

Here is a video of the track, recorded at 1pm.



And a couple of screenshots









Does that tickles your fancy? :)


Notice anything? :)

On the groove matter, it is coming along nicely.  I have it match most of my racing line, only need to make a few more adjustments and an update will be available later today.

I've fixed a couple more things as well, cracks and stuff that went wrong when flow connecting.

Also removed the road edges from the physics engine.  Turns out I had set it to physics enable when I detached those parts, since it was grass afterall.  So I had named them 1GRASS_SOMETHING.

Now they are simply ROADEDGE_XXX, so if you go a little out in the overlap turn, you won't be hitting the elevated road edge that was there.  I also lowered it as well.


Wednesday, July 30, 2014

v0.28 codename "Groovy" in the share

Getting better and better!  Since I talked about the groove recently, and when I looked into it, I was using the much denser road mesh.. so it would have been quite overkill to duplicate it...

So I duplicated the road mesh, merged it all back together, and since I made sure that all edge loops loop properly, it was piece of cake to remove the extra edges in the width direction, and keep only 1 in the middle, reducing poly count by a lot.

I also made a spline to spline map it to this new object, and duplicated the result to map 2 groove textures.  One, the original from the track, and another, a tire marks texture coming from another AC track.

Here how it looks:



Also, since I was in the mood of fixing things, I also fixed the remaining flow connect mess up  Fixed a couple of cracks I noticed with the replays.

EDIT:  I will be revisiting the splnie after comparing a good lap with the groove I did.  At first, I tried to follow the bmw guide, but the track is like out of proportion in the guide, and barely look like what I was seeing, so at some point I said screw that, and I tried to remember where I would be on the track when I lap it.  I got quite a few corners, but some could be much improved.

First time I do this, I never done it for the rf2 version since the way rf2 does it didnt looked that bad with the groove texture mapped to the same uv channel as the diffuse.

EDIT2:  The screenshot depicts the Fast preset.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

A1 Class race

This is like the battle of David against Goliath. This is my first "class" race, where AI doesn't have the same car as I do, in AC.

It's nice to see the power range varies quite a bit, so when you race with better or worse people than you, it must be nice to have handicaps like this to have a more equal ground.

I usually start last, but this time I didn't set it, and started 2nd, next to the Z4.  I wasn't able to get in front of the Z4 at start, and for nearly the whole race, I was 2nd.

On the first lap, I went rather easy, confident I would gain on him corner by corner, but it turns out his straight speed was way too much for me.

So on the second lap, the one recorded (I have my replays set to 25mb)... I decided to go all in, I would either crash or win.

I managed to pass the z4 at the kleines karussel, and made it halfway on the dott in 1st position, but I knew it was too late in the lap for me to win...

As I was going on dottinger hohe, I heard him coming and closing, and I couldnt do anything!

I entered hohenrain like storm trying to close in and maybe make a pass by the start/finish, but I wasn't able to!

Very nice race!  The AI is actually pretty good, and I don't get when people say the AI rams... it never rammed me once, and actually will slow down if you manage to win the inside of a corner, he will slow down knowing he can't get in... the AI was at 100%.


Monday, July 28, 2014

Broken the Pagani Zonda R world record!

While selecting the appearance of the Zonda R, I noticed the world record skin was actually a lap record time of 6m47 on the nordschleife, and I was curious to see if I could beat that.

After a few laps and crashes, I got used to the car a bit and made this lap.



Now, I know it means nothing compared to the world record and I don't take this seriously, just wanted to know how it would go in game.  If I had been closer to 6m47, I would have made a comparison video, provided I could have found the original video of the Zonda R somewhere.

And here is the time slip :)



It is recorded using the latest 0.26 version.

v0.26 available in the share

After taking notice of PCGamer giving away free GTR Evolution steam key, I have decided to share the BTSync key with you guys.  I won't go out and advertise it everywhere, but you are free to give it away to your friends, and let it know on your favorite forums.

The BTSync key is: BY2YPYOYFTKP3MPOKKODKKLSQA4WTBSNT

If you need help setting up BTSync, let me know in the comments section.  This is a torrent type sharing, so it's recommended you keep it up when you can to help me seed the downloads, but you aren't required to do so.

So what's new in v0.26?

Quite a couple of things.  After coming to conclusion I couldnt do the grass yesterday, I decided to fix a couple of things that's been bugging me for a bit.

For example, there was a treeline sticking out a bit too much in flugplatz that was seen when you entered quiddelbacher hohe on the right.  Another on the left as well.  Fixed them so they don't stick out anymore.

There was also a floating treeline in flugplatz (from flutplatz) on the right.. due to when I smoothed out the landscape a bit.  Pushed it back to ground.

There should be a noticeable performance increase.  When I worked the mesh, I merged everything together, and when I splitted it out, I wasn't very careful about object sizes, because the track ran as one object anyway.  I believe the performance is better now.  I splitted everything back to small pieces, making sure to split them as I did in rF2 so things should LOD properly when you enter a new section after taking a corner, things should disappear from view nicely around.

I haven't ran a benchmark but I have a good feeling it is up quite a bit.  I'm sure my replays were laggy a bit before, and now they are fine.

Let me know how it goes for you.

I have also fixed the two ambulances that were pitch black, and the opc banner in breidscheid.  Turns out there was two of these objects sitting on top... so that's why there was a section looking different, it was the other sticking out.  Now it looks all good now.

I also fixed the bilstein bridge.  There was a missing banner and it turns out the bridge is made of two different object, and the import must have messed it up, so I fixed it so it doesn't flicker, and show off the banner properly.  There was a huge block of concrete sticking out, I'm not sure if it was meant or not, but I resized it so it is below the fences... I doubt it is meant to be the other way...

I thought it was some shadow object, not meant to be rendered, but if I deleted it, the bottom part below the banner disappeared, so it seems to have been made so it fills this part.. .but I wonder why it was so huge, sticking out past the fences.  But we didnt see the fences, cause its part of the other objects, and it was in the huge concrete block.

Should all be good now.

While splitting out the outside terrain, I noticed I had messed up my detaching a bit, and some curbs part were part of this outside terrain object.. so I re-attached those polys back to the curb object they should belong to, and fixed the mappings.

I would love to hear about what you think of the replays as well :)  Haven't heard anything so far!

EDIT:: Two important things I forgot... I have fixed the grass mat in the gp area, it was not configured as the mapping was much too small anyway, so I fixed both the mapping, and assigned the Multilayer shader to it.  Also updated the tarmac in the same area to the new values I use elsewhere.

And I removed all vibration_length from the surfaces.ini.  I originally had no choice to use it since the surface wasn't smooth enough, but I did some testing, and it can now be disabled.  So the FFB is better now, a tad more responsive.  You will certainly notice it.

EDIT2:  If you want to share the BTSync key, please share the article on my blog instead of the key directly.  This way, people will know where to go afterward to comments or if they have problems, etc...  Thanks!



Sunday, July 27, 2014

Sadly, need to let go of the grass

Well, first let me share the pain with you!














So yeah, it is with big sadness that I need to let go of that sweet motherload of grass!

Yesterday, when I was going originally as I first showed you, I crashed the editor trying to load the .fbx.  At first, I thought it was 64 bit, but it turns out it is only 32bit.  So I maxxed out the editor while having a scene that is too heavy.

I played a lot with the settings of ForestPack pro trying to find out if I could use slightly less blades to reach a uniform look, and I was able to skim it a little bit.  So I restarted from the paddock, and this time, I didn't do full grass sides, along the hills, I just did the hills, and made it about to Miss Hit Miss, and I could still go on about to werhseifen, but knowing the editor crashed a 145mb .fbx file, and I was at 130 at miss hit miss, with some large hills to cover until werhseifen, and even larger after... I had to come to realize this won't be possible at the moment.

Not until a 64bit version of the editor and game is released.  That really blows. Knowing this, I really wonder how Kunos will manage to make this track look alive with plenty of track side objects, decent trees (not like the cheap nurb circuit with a variety of 3 trees or so) grass and so on...  I'm scared... might not be what I was thinking it would be.

But there is still faith with rF2.  I think the 64 bit version is released now, so likely is the plugin, I will need to catch up a bit and see if I can make my dream nord happen over there... with plenty of trees and grass everywhere.

I'm down now... seeing how good it looked... can't believe I have to let that go...


Friday, July 25, 2014

Development news

Not much to say, other than check this out!









So, what do you think?  I'm currently doing something I wanted to do for a while, and I had started on the rF2 version, but never finiished it up as it might have been too much.  But I still have a lot of room for additional stuff in this version, and the AC engine might cope better with heavier track, I dunno.

EDIT:  I got grass outside guardrails from the paddock to quiddelbacher-hohe, not inclusively.  It really looks stunningly beautiful and render the track almost photorealistic.

This grass is one of the texture I got from gametextures btw.  It is an amazing piece of grass with retarded normals.

Just imagine if I could get them to do the trees we so need, plus some other textures....  aynone willing to donate to let me subscribe for 2-3 months?  Well, we would start with 1, but I doubt they can get (and would) do all these requests within 1 month.

Please, it would be nice if you could voice your opinion on the matter, if you would be interested or not.  I'm not trying to make a profit, and if you have followed me during the rf2 days, you know that everything went right back into the track.  So I would let you know when I have the amount reached, and it's up to you if you want to make a donation past that point.

And here are a few more of these sweeties!









Thursday, July 24, 2014

Darn tree lines....

Hmmm, that's odd.  Well it somehow makes a bit of sense, but it turns out I cannot use a simple normal map to shade the treeline darker at the bottom, and lighter at the top.  When the sun is in front or behind the tree, the lighting effect is inversed, depending on the Y axis setup of the normal map.  So even if I flip the Y axis, it fixes the treelines for a given sun position, either front or behind, but when the sun gets to the other position, they screw up.

So I could either tune them to look alright for the morning or for the afternoon, but it seems I cannot have both.

Seems like I will have to split all those treelines, and edit their normals manually.  Lots of work ahead, but I feel it's going to be much easier than the tree were... so it doesn't scare me as much as it initially did when I made the normal maps.

So, upcoming is the treelines, and I'll work at improving the AI, since I got quite a bit better with this layout since I did the AI, I should be able to improve it a bit.


Wednesday, July 23, 2014

v0.25 update in the BTSync share

Just to let you know the v0.25 has been moved to the BTSync share, and I've finished uploading the full replay video with the new cameras.  I have also removed a few of the previous versions from the share.  If you are running default settings of BTSync, you still have the archive in a sub folder, just look around if you prefer an older version for whatever reasons.

Let me know your thoughts on how it looks!



Since I already pretty much summed it up on youtube already, here is a cut and paste version of what's new:

New!  Full replay capability!  I have carefully positioned each to maximize the view of the track at that particular spot, and made sure all odd things, sharp angle, etc is kept to the absolute minimum, so it depicts the track really well.  All rough edges are mostly hidden, and the camera are rather optimized, using as little as I could, using the zooming at appropriate time, or to create easy screenshots location.

All that while taking great care to position the camera so every apex is easily visible, as well as entry and exit point...

I have also finished up adjusting brightness level on the distant objects I skipped when I recorded the v0.24 video.  Stuff in the GP, village, paddock, gas station on the dottinger hohe, etc..

I have also replaced the grass building near the village, I looked in the gtr evo original track, and it was the same, a grass building, wall and roof.  Since it has no mapping and no texture, and is barely visible unless you look for it, I have assigned it a plain concrete texture from somewhere else in the track.

The replay is the same as v0.24, but now you will get to see it from a different angle.

I have watched it all day while tuning up the cameras, I have used this particular replay because it's a very good lap, and the car jumped at every point it could....  and since it doesnt happen very often, I thought it would be great to tune the cameras to show the jumps as well :)

I believe it is my cleanest lap around the track so far.  I look at it, and I wish I could extract the fast path spline from it, cause I'm sure that lap would make a great AI :)




Tuesday, July 22, 2014

v0.24 video

I've been lapping around with the Pagani Huayra to do my testing around the track, first because it was challenging and lots of fun to drive.  I've come rather comfortable with it, and done a pretty good lap when I wanted to record my lap video showing the latest modifications.

The video is recorded at 5pm.  I started it with the 4 replay cameras in, and I switched to cockpit for the remaining of the lap.

The lap time is 7:07.

This car is so awesome!  I tried the mclaren a bit as well, and I much rather like the pagani.

Here is the video:



Watch it fully if you can, it's a pretty good lap :)

Development news

Well, I wasn't quite satisfied with the trees, etc, I just finished what I think is the final pass now.

I have opened up the nurb track in 3dsimed to have an idea of the values used by Kunos, and it turns out I wasn't that far off, but was missing some diffuse lighting as I thought.  It was too subtle, and in low sun position, the trees had virtually no shine on them.

I have re-edited all trees textures, and made them with similar brightness/saturation values as those used by Kunos.  Basically, I lowered brightness a good deal, and raised/lowered saturation in some cases, changed the hue a little here and there, and I got something rather solid now.

I re-did the tree lines normal map, they were inverted in some case, with the top being darker when it should be lighter.

I had started to do the replay camera, but I was thinking that the track should look better if we are to scrutinize it during replays :)

Here how it looks at all time of day, in 1hr interval, taken from both cockpit and the first replay camera as well, to show a back and different view.

8h00





9h00






10h00






11h00






12h00






13h00






14h00






15h00






16h00






17h00






18h00







If you guys like this, I could release an update tonight or tomorrow with the track as it is now, with the 4 first replay camera, and I will finish them up for the week end.