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.

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.

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%.

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.