Hello, Version 0.28 is here, with many changes and improvements, including new 3D grass and Four extra Rally Stages. Please see changelog for details. Download Link 1(thanks to Corti): http://www.internationalsimracing.com/forum/index.php?topic=2795 Download Link 2(thanks to maximus1971): https://www.mediafire.com/file/9w5b4df5dj1sj5h/Targa_Florio_v0.28.rfcmp/file Changelog: v0.28 (2020-12-18) - New 4 rally stages, all pits&garages&grids are set at same location. (Do not click RACE button until the start of session timer begins to countdown, otherwise will receive penalty. AI currently does not work at Stage 4, other Stages are ok.) - New 3D grass, enabled by setting "Circuit Detail" to FULL (lower "Circuit Detail" to disable). - New set of Loading Screens & Icons (thanks to the track map created by John Bradley). - Added some ambient sounds. - Adjusted terrain feedback for grass and gravel. - Reduced cut detection. - Fixed horizon & various objects LOD issue. - Fixed some road texture UV map. - Fixed various objects. - Removed pitlane speed limit. - Original GPL & RF2 Credits readme.txt are now packaged inside Targa_Florio.mas Spoiler: Changelog of older version v0.27 (2020-12-15) - Main 72km road surface was re-constructed with 8 square subdivision across 6-7 meter wide surface. The new surface also includes around 2% crossfall and some random height variation (about 1cm). (Real road is still disabled, due to several minutes long loading time and unstable performance.) - Re-adjusted Terrain feedback (TDF) values for the new surface, most of RoadBumpLen values are reduced accordingly. - Renamed track name to "Targa Florio 1967" on track list, added track icon for old UI. v0.26 (2020-11-24) - Fixed folder/mas structure, default weather is now working. - Added new Haze values to GDB file. - Road sign & stone are a little heavier now. v0.25 (2020-09-16) - Fixed a floating tree (trees589.gmt). - Fixed clipping signs (scilla1,scitopl,scitopr,calta7,calta1,scilla02,scitopl01,scitopr01,rosi). Most of the clipping is caused by incorrect mesh normal (recalculated with 3dsimed or other 3d software for fixing). Commented out duplicated gmt entries in SCN. - Erased many duplicated materials (suffix name _MU,_CR). - Changed most of "Alpha Blending Transparency" material to "Alpha Chroma". - Reverted road grip value back to original. - All trackside crowds and vehicles are now visible in all sessions (as also in GPL). - Reduced base haze value for cloudy and storm. - Fixed pitlane sector timing objects position (Previously was placed outside real pitlane area). Garage area was and still is the only working pitlane area. v0.24 (2020-09-13) - Fixed moveable objects that couldn't receive lights due to incorrect pivot points (thanks to senormen's solution!) - Adjusted one of grass diffuse texture (_GRASS_ADD.DDS) for better color/brightness transition. - Each MAS file now includes _batching.scn file with correct tag for easy batching process. v0.23 (2020-09-11) - fixed objects that flickering during night. - restored and excluded some bump textures from batching progress. v0.21 (2020-09-11) - Updated old GDB entries with new values, new geographical position. Loose objects are lighter (to avoid one KO). Old obsolete values are removed/commented out. - Updated TDF, reduced main road grip by 1%, increased grass grip (help cars recovering). - Updated all textures, corrected brightness (based on DDS files from v0.1, in order to preserve original rich color), see screenshots. - Updated SCN files with new values, including reflectionmapper and IBL probe. Old obsolete values are removed/commented out. - Updated all Tree shaders to T1 no shadow, so they don't recieve shadows (to avoid bad looking shadow on X board tree model). - Updated new haze value to eliminate white horizon effect, make sure you select default weather, or remove old TARGA_FLORIOs.wet inside "UserData\player\Settings\Targa_Florio" folder. - Both GPL & RF2 readme.txt is packaged inside Targa_Florio_Regular_Grid.mas. Thank you all, have fun!
I am going to submit a review, I think there is too much grass going on the road, in the archives I see so many grass going on the road and I'm sure the maintenance was done before the race.
First, thanks for everyone's kind words, knowing that people enjoy the track is the best reward. ---------------------------- To some of the criticism about optimization, just want to say here: I have spent more than 10 hours a day, almost sleeplessly on this track for the past month, and I did this voluntarily in the hope to bring a better Targa Florio update that doesn't take another decade to make (or losing motivation half way). And none of my work on road reconstruction & 3d grass were an easy task. That's one reason the track was not updated for the past 7 years (some modders tried, but given up), there are many old posts in this thread describes how hard it is to work with track this big. Now onto optimization, the core problem with optimization was laying underneath the original files, which all the track objects were split into far too many separated pieces (about 15000 objects in original conversion). And this issue is magnified by the new reconstructed road surface which has many times more poly counts, and that's why I have disabled real road, to avoid even more performance issue. To make comparison, in Isle Of Man conversion, there are only around 2500 objects, which both the road surface & scenery models were carefully and evenly split into 600-700 pieces. Nevertheless, the current 0.28 still runs smoothly and has very good FPS on my PC (i7+2070), though I did not own VR to test performance in VR. The solution for optimization, would be to merge the objects (there are currently 17000 objects) evenly, section by section according to their type & position, then re-adjust all the LOD values to avoid objects floating & popping issues. This will be a crazy amount work and extremely time consuming. Nevertheless, thanks to the original conversion team, all the mod files are freely available, feel free to Help and Contribute. Have a nice day.
@svictor everyone like me hi your work which is wonderful and thanks to your investment with all those who have contributed to this wonderful track. Now that I have written this, any objective criticism should be welcome. There is a quote that says "the best is sometimes the enemy of the good". Here, know that like many I support you 100% but if it is forbidden to express his feelings or his opinion, then my place is not here. have a good day.
Thank you for the support. Helpful comments are always welcome, and gives motivation. -------------------- To continue about 3D grass, there are limitations to what I can achieve, or achieve it in a realistic time frame. And there are reasons that there ain't many tracks in RF2 has grass. For Targa, adding grass is even harder, due to the complex terrain shape and giant size. A good optimized 3d grass, in my opinion, would be X board shape with 2 just enough long strips so it covers enough area. However the larger or longer those strips are, the harder or nearly impossible for them actually to follow the complex terrain shape (so you don't see them floating or extending across the road). Not to mention this kind grass will require modder to manually check meters by meters to ensure they all fit terrain shape & position correctly (and this track is 72km long). After some testing, I decided to use X board shape that formed by 2 small triangle meshes (usually other game choose 2 triangulated quad meshes, which is even bigger), and created grass texture in a circle/dot shape, so it can follow any kind of surface shapes, without having issue with floating or extending far into road. I do have to make those triangle meshes big enough so they can create enough density with a given number meshes in an area and looks like 3d grass. If the grass size is smaller, they would look more closer to real life (as some comment suggested) and less likely to extend far into road, however smaller size will also appear sparse and revealing to much empty flat land. Of course adding more grass meshes would help make them thick and dense again, but at a huge cost of performance and file size. (For reference, there are already 1 million triangle xboard meshes in 0.28, with 6 different color set and randomly distributed) So, at the moment, this 3D grass is the best I can achieve, despite there are a few small problems, such as some grass extending a little far into main road or on hillside, those are the things I'm aware while making them, but it's the compromise I have to take. I can try to manually delete those grass that extends too far, but it would also cost a huge amount time. Of course my modding skill is very limited, someone maybe know better ways to do grass. (one of the best way would be implanting some kind auto-grass generation, such as the one from assetto corsa CM's CSP) Thanks for understanding.
I have mixed feeling about procedural grass as seen in AC implemented by modders. On one hand it is impressive, but on the other hand something is not right about it. Yes, there are several places where vertical grass appears to be going over road too much and where it goes through some walls. I would suppose it would take a day or too manual deleting to make it perfect. I think it is good suggestion to get done sometime in future. But we understand (especially those that has some experience with track modding) that what you did so far is absolutely outstanding in such short span of time, and expecting even more is unfair. To me you are tracks modder of the year, no doubt. Speaking of performance in VR. Is there anything special about VR performance other than that it simply has to be able to render ar least 90fps for two displays ? I am happy that I never got VR lol I think that is good idea not to do realroad for this track as I have expressed it in the past already. I don't think I will ever do more than two laps in this track. So far I have done many single laps, but never more. And I like the fast loading time of this track, and grip is good, doing real road would also probably mean making grip worse, so it wouldn't be too grippy when road would get saturated, which probably rarely would. As I was driving the track yesterday (with single sccreen I still have good frames, by the way), I was thinking about how outstanding is that in a track of this size there are so many movable objects. I remember in AC there was extremely limited amount of those. As seen in this picture of Alfa narrowly avoiding them: I always think what if they were all a single wall object. Or just few objects across whole track. I actually probably would enjoy the increased challenge. But I have a feeling that most would instead choose few less fps than being challenged harder to survive this track when going fast. There is a story of Brian Redman once sliding with his Porsche sideways straight into one of those stones, he hit it right with a fuel tank and everything went in flames including him, he was able to jump out and put off fire from himself, and waited for 40 minutes for help to arrive while suffering severe burns.
I love this track and can't say enough thanks to everyone who contributed to this great project for their hard work. To have 4 stages is really wonderful. We can change the stage every week and after 4 weeks everyone can drive the entire route ... It is OK. to post this here? We have a server with Targa Florio v0.30 (All Stages & Complete Track) and the Tommy78 WTCR 2018 Mod @ simracing4fun.org TFIOM|DE (Competition Standings here). Have a nice Sunday everyone. Update: The Server is now running TARGA FLORIO 0.30 & Isle Of Man The Server will allways be updated with the latest versions from TF & IoM ...
great job !!!!! Thank you very much for dedicating so much love to this circuit!!! Graciassssssssssssssssssssssssss
I like the compromise, that the grass pops up through the tarmac. Its a road not a racing track so wild natur has its effect. This grass somehow makes the track more recognizable in my memory to distinguish a turn form another and with stages its even eaiser to learn it. Great work