Merging Mods in rfactor is a lot of trial and error perhaps anybody technique freak can explain why merging is so hard in rfactor but easy in gtr2 and gtl? btw I wrote to rfactor support because i do not understand why a hardcore driving game from 2006 is less mergable than gtr2 from 2003 but got no answer i hope you can correct this with a patch or in the upcoming rfactor2 guess it is better even for selling the product BTW i posted this in the rfactor forum as well because I still hope for a patch cheers
Racing one car from one mod... against another. Even with the "All cars and all tracks" mod... it was still a bit shaky when trying to use some cars side by side.
Indeed that is a major problem in rfactor. Combining different mods on a server in "all tracks and vehicles" mode can cause CTDs easily. I'm not really a specialist with this but I guess it has s.th. to do with the material names used. Once several mods use the same generic names for different materials the drama seems to begin. For rfactor2 it would be good to have some mechanism making material names unique to avoid problems. I really would appreciate to hear some official info on this.
From a League point of view i can only support this topic. We have to skip merging-ideas for our championships because of the issues with merging cars/mods. Would be great if we could implement this in rF2
perhaps anybody trechnique who knows gtr2 as well can point out what is different in gtr2 and gtl (Older!!! isi games) and makes it easier to combine cars from any mod there. I think it would be a big step to the better even if a patch for rfactor 1 could be released to solve this. cheers
Yep totally support this one, would be fantastic for league racing to do a multi car series of whatever you wanted.
@ boern69: 1. First of all, not all mods have the same final quality, and that's especially valid for rfactor, where there's over 100 surely, and only a handfull really worth it. 2. What's the exact point in merging even two mods, one simulating a stock Miata, the other a stock Nissan GTR, in which the Miata kills the Nissan everytime - because the Miata mod was done by a kid in 3 days, and the Nissan by a modding team in a year? 3. Given mods have different physics quality, different collision boxes, different UI, etc, how exactly would you expect them to work properly together when not even their creators made them with "mergeability" in mind? It's not the game engine that's the problem here.
The discussion here is not about quality of mods. Different mods should work used at the time no matter if they have the same quality. Same for the mods and the performance of their respective cars... If someone decides to run a server with different mods it should work without any CTDs, no matter which cars are used. OK, finally you are right at least with the last bit of this: I also think ISI just didn't care about easy mergeability. But different mods can work together without having the problems rfactor has in these circumstances. Try out GTR2 (which is based on ISI's game engine) and you'll understand. I suppose ISI just did not assume that there would be so many different mods created. Same for the server browser. It just isn't capable of handling the amount of servers.
An opinion is an opinion, it's not right or wrong. What i did there was ask someone who cares about mod mergeability about its purpose when only a handful of mods can be considered realistic. I don't see how mediocrity gathered together makes a better product; unless you really fancy that! And at the bottom of it I don't think it should be ISI's job to make sure that all present and future mods for its platform work merged. I am positive that kind of development man-hours can otherwise be employed in other more important areas of the sim. And for one I am pretty thankful that rfactor can be modded this easily in the first place. Don't forget there are plenty of games on the market who can only be played "vanilla", period (see Bad Company 2).
To write something from a modders point of view. Mergability sounds nice, but is very hard to do, because you have to reach a level of compatibility between mods, that exceeds reasonable amount of work. With a medium to large-size mod you have all hands full testing the cars on various tracks and make sure they run smoothly without interfering with track-issues or physics-issues. Testing takes lots of time, effort and at CTDP this is one of the major time factors just to get our mod in a good state. If we had to ensure, that the mod runs together with other merged mods, we would still be testing, as you'd have to test every combination. rFactor allows the Modders to do things a multitude of ways, there is no necessary right way and it happens, that solutions are not compatible. Also there are easily small mistakes which break things: have you car texture name bmw.dds and have a track-ad called bmw.dds and you are screwed with texture errors… It's as simple as that, which makes it hard. This is also, why CTDP didn't support the All-Cars-all-Tracks-Mode, you could enable the mod to use it, but the chance of issues coming up is too high…
@jonelsorel you are right many mods are not good but i know about 12 very good car mods EXAMPLE of only 2!! for combining 1.drm mod and 2.historx mod plz explain how to merge them easiy? My experience is: I guess the material names are a big problem. And I know backfire material problems as well. This all leads to ctd while racing. Even the different directory structures in different mods lead to loading problems. If you do not correct the structure and the referring gen files But as far as I understand it is easier if you put all mods in one rfm file (vehicle filter) than to activate ALL cars and VEHICLES <-rfm because this can cause much more problems if you are running many mods. Is this correct? The point is merging in Rfactor is by far much more complicated than in other isi games - and why must this be so ? Rfactor needs mods for gameplay without mods it is nothing. FE GTR2 does not need mods because there are nice racing cars in it, but it has mods and can handle mods much better and easier. do not understand me wrong I like rfactor but this point makes me angry.
For me it does not matter if some mods are worth merging due to different quality. It should be up to the user if a certain combination of mods is fun or not. I'm just wondering why material names and the backfire issue cause so many problems in rfactor while everything is fine in gtr2. So in fact ISI's game engine can be used to avoid such problems in the first place if you are aware of it. But I'm wondering if ISI really knows about this and is planning to improve rfactor2 in this regard. Would be great to hear some official comment about it ...
Quality of mod includes "did the modder rename all the materials (textures) so that they are unique?" If the answer is "no" then you may or may not have merging problems. The problem is not ISI's to fix.
rFactor has no problem merging mods. The people who make mods don't follow the same file structure. Different sound file locations, different vehicle file locations...etc. Some do it to keep their mods from being use with others. It's all up to the mod developer to decide how they do it. buzard
For me merging mod is not a good idea, there is too many way to make the mods that's lead to have crash regularly. The material naming, the multicar leds problems, is a problem too, the physics mixing lead to a non homogeneous mod. Working on ES mod and it's an heavy job to integrate several car types in a mod made by the same guys, so merging different mods lead to unstable result for the one which want drive seriously online mainly. Perhaps in rF2 the material naming will be controlled, but I don't think so, and not sure it's a good idea to force this.
