Development news

Well, if you are using 3dsmax or similar software, never bind the quadrify function to a common and easy to access hotkey, such as the letter Q.

The quadrify tool can indeed mess up your triangulated mesh quite badly.  It often cannot guess which edges to remove, and doesn't remove the right one.  So when quadrifying a mesh such as Nord, it's best to work on small area, and inspect the quadrify result carefully before moving forward.

If you aren't aware, you can select a bunch of polys to be quadrified, hit the quadrify selection tool, undo, and switch to edges sub mode, and you will see the edges being removed.  It's then easy to inspect the red edges and see if it is indeed removing the good ones.

I noticed early yesterday that I have accidentally used the quadrify tool on all my mesh, and it screwed up a lot of things.  I was fixing up some bad quadrify when I had the impression I didn't quadrified the area yet.. so I looked ahead and it was all quadrified.  What an horror!

The worse was, it happened  quite a few Max files ago, so I had to detach what I had done, find the max file where it wasn't quadrified, and turns out it was one of the first few, and merge the changes in this one.

I've now fully recovered and done quite a bit of progress today.  My girlfriend and son are gone for the weekend at her mother's, so I can work full time on it.

I'm past the overlap now, working on hatzenbach, almost up to quiddelbacher hohe.  So it's going great.

The increased details on the curbs, like drains and the concrete extensions that are different kinds and different shapes are a bugger to fit in the increased mesh...  and in the planned road edges for rF2.

Also, guess what?  The AC engine is awesome.  Not only I'm able to preview my track in the editor while it's all merged together, but I can also drive on it in the game as well, with no noticeable performance hit.  I haven't run an fps counter, so there might be one, but its minimal if there is.

I had hard time believing it could load a huge map such as this, without lod'ing anything, since its all stuck together as one mesh (well the terrain), and let me drive it normally.

The more I dig into AC, the more I love that thing.  I really like the workflow of it.

I also done some testing on increasing road mesh density on a patch, from the paddock to tiergarten, to test in one of the steepest hill in the track, and the one that had the most oscillation in v0.18 when you took it at high speed, and I managed to make the track even smoother than it was.  So you can expect pristine quality for the track in the next update :)  Not sure there will be bumps yet, as I will most certainly release in between, so you can have a feel at it before I spend more time on the matter.

The mesh density that I'm aiming for is around 0.5m for the length of an edge, on the length side of the road.  It doesn't need any in the width direction.  My test patch had none.. however, I will likely add some to define bumps, otherwise it wont be possible.

Things are looking very good.  The side hills have most of their roughness gone, I'm doubling the resolution on these hills by flow connecting them, so it smooths the larger 5-6m panel a bit.  I have also worked a good bit on the mountain the castle sits on.  It was way too jaggy, specially looking back from hohenrain.  So I smoothed it a little bit so we dont see any sharp edge on it.

If I can manage to swap the worst textures we have in game, we will have a very very decent nord :)