Pleclair ! I'm very happy to see YOU back here in the forum and the most important thing now we know you are ok. To become at the same time a huge track update is what should I say ..? it is incredible Thank you for that !!! I think we all are very happy Very cool alex
Good to have you back, pleclair, and thanks for all your hard work... I hope things will continue to improve for you again. Uwe
Thanks! Very nice atmosphere and almost feels like a completely new track. And I don't feel lonely anymore...
Welcome back pleclaire. Nice to hear you are good. Really enjoyed that video from new version. I love the smoothed trackside hills. Nice to see all the trackside objects from the 24h layout, next step is implement better gp track for full 24h layout? Maybe we should continue our conversation from December for redoing some parts of raceline which do not fit good to reality. Thank you for big update. Gesendet von meinem GT-I9001 mit Tapatalk 2
"Fahren Sie zur Hölle" haha!! Love that!! very nice update!! never been to the VLN series there before but this update gives me a foretaste for a visit this year! A friend of mine told me the best snack bars already...
A wonderful update that brings us much closer to realism in too many ways to list! Please take this in that context, then, because overall your hard work and many, many improvements are much appreciated! However, for me there are three major realism let-downs: 1) A number of consistently flashing textures, especially the multi-coloured flags 2) The camp fires are "over the top" (English expression meaning too big, too many, too noticeable, too dramatic and just an overall detrimental distraction to the immersion) 3) The dust that might still be "over the top" for a desert track, but is surely out of place in the "Green Hell," a damp, cool place where minimal dust exists
Agree regarding the camp fires. They don't look good. Also I find the grass textures a little bright. Otherwise a very nice update. There is clear progress here.
I agree, the dust don't let me see, breaks immersion and gives me slowdowns in fps. A little few had been better imo. I'm very very happy you are right
You're all very welcome! I can't stress enough that I went this far because of you guys. Not only the donations but more specially the moral support, comments, anything in this thread was nice to me. I'm happy to finally deliver something closer to what I imagined a while ago. Not entirely there, still need a lot of texturing work, and some work on the mesh here and there. I might have a shot at creating some new buildings for the paddock soon, I think I have everything I need now to do something like this. They won't certainly be as nice as ISI's or other top modders, but most certainly better than what we have. I might also be able to set up the bridge Richard sent me a while ago and replace the simple one we have. I just found out Imageshack have turned premium only for uploads.... what a bunch of... I will be using picasa from now on to show you my screenshots, as I cannot post any new images, reached limit a while ago. So here are a few screenshots of the mesh as I imported it, showing as a whole, and zoomed on the karussel for a close up example, and the same now... https://plus.google.com/photos/101456214933721693013/albums/6002961643150211361?banner=pwa Don't mind the poly numbers, in the before version, only the terrain is imported, and now, most everything is imported (still need a few things to import, but won't change much the numbers, as they are simple objects I missed.) I'm really happy to hear the performance has increased noticeably, I wasn't sure exactly how much since I did not remembered exactly what they were, but they did seemed better from memory. I didn't wanted to say there is an increase without being sure... So at the moment, I have the whole terrain mesh done. Will need to sort out couples of edges that went wrong with meshsmoothing (fixed much but left a few here and there because I was getting eager to see how it looked in game). But its not enough to decrease performance really and I have fixed the spots where the shading was going wrong. As you can see a lot of the edges and verts have been completely redone in a grid like pattern. There is very little overlapping stuff now. Still a couple, some I can't really remove, but it's now much easier to work with the mesh, I mean adding loops and stuff. I was pleased to see how easy it was to increase the geometry further from what I had originally done to do a bit better blending. The track being so huge, it's hard to guess how big an edge really is, and even tho I thought I originally added enough geometry, I was wrong... I added about 150k-200k more to better blend in the hills.. I had enough on the road edges already, and missing some around the concrete extensions and some corners. You should also know that I had no internet and couldnt read on the matter, so what you see is the result of a lot of experimentation. At first, I was pulling my hair out, but managed to understand it a bit better. It's far from a perfect job, but the thing is, the geometry is still very low to do a nice detailed blend with some rougher and more random edges on the blend... I tried to not blend equally, and that's why I needed to add more geometry to the hills, as the blending was across meters at first in game... way too big.. I'm pretty happy about the road edges tho. I think they look pretty good while driving. Might retouch a few, but overall, really pleased of the result. It really adds much to the track. I tried to go from memory of my many laps around track, places I got out more often and stuff, and tried to make some life on the track edges. Roughening spots were you are more likely to hit the siding, like before and after corner entry, and I tried to figure the most obvious spots where one would go out and roughen it there. Same for the curbs, if you notice those where we are likely to run over them should have more ground showing than some others. I think it should be nice visual cues for those starting to learn the track as well. As you might have noticed the curbs have undergone a major beauty treatment! This is the work of gametexture It's good to mention this is the result I had on first shot. They worked perfectly spot on with no need to do anything. Well, except than redo all the curbs mapping. I can now straighten stuff better now. The mesh allows much easier uv mapping. Well the curbs aren't done any different really, and I could have done them earlier, but didnt knew how to back then. So now there should be no stretching on the curbs anymore with smaller and larger sections. The whole terrain mapping have been redone as well. This is something I had troubles with, cause I needed to join the mesh all together to uvmap it at once, so the blended section would match together on the second channel, which is a copy of the first. So I was crashing a lot with 32bit, and decided to give a try to 64 bit even tho the rf2 plugins doesn't work with it. It didnt screwed up my max file and let me handle the file with ease, didnt crashed once. I knew 32bit allowed only 3.something gb to be used, but since I was on 64 bit, I didn't thought about that.. when I saw max use 3.3gb in the monitor, I knew something was fishy, and it was probably this. 64bit ran up to 4.something gb used. The road edges have been mapped planar with the rest of the terrain (all grasses are mapped together) so they blend in perfectly now. I was first trying to match the grass to the size of the grass in the edge, but was going crazy, and thought I should do it otherwise. So there isn't 10-20 .dds for the road edges and curbs no more... all the curbs are part of one textures, including the concrete extensions, and the road edges are two materials, since there is only two type of grasses surrounding the road. So cutting a lot of fat here. I also done a lot of cleanup in the terrain/road mats. I spotted all the mats using the same .dds file and changed the mat id and deleted the duplicates. A few grasses remains, that is because I crashed at some point and lost those changes, and didnt redo it. When I got the loading error, missing textures, I was eager to see my stuff and instead copied the textures back in instead of changing mats and re-exporting As you have surely noticed, I have made the brick siding textures on the road edges real, and even rounded them a bit with a chamfer so they won't be cutting thru tires (and more specially look nicer ) More subtle, is the drain siding, they are been raised as well. So you will feel them where you step over them now. A lot of work was done in the karussel area as you can see in the screenshots. After playing evo's nord, I noticed how nicer the karussel was and modelled ours a bit like it. I mean the smoothed bank, and the raised inside. I'm dont remember if evo's did the inside as well, but I knew it was like this watching pics from real life, and decided it would be much nicer if done this way! If you aren't one to read stuff when you are installing the mods, you might have missed the details settings stuff. On max, everything is loaded, with the new extra 24h road side objects. Stuff like campers, fires, more crowds, etc... on high, you will have the same experience as it was previously in the tourist only. Going to med further remove stuff now, to try to help those with tighter pc specs. med-low aren't fully done now, but I added couples of things already. Another big thing done is organization. This will help anyone working on this track later on, when I finally throw the towel and make the max file public. The .scn files is all broken down into sections, which mimics my layer groups in max. So learning the objects is much easier this way. The gmt's and .dds are also all broken into multiples sub-dirs into GMT and Maps folders. It's a lot more work to package, but doing update is much easier now. I only need to package part of the whole when I change couple of things.. It should also help doing update type package too. Off the top of my head, here is the things I know need some more work: As I modified and smoothed the whole terrain, some trees went floating again and some went down too. I will need to go over them and sit them down one last time(!!), same goes for the crowds and added 24h objects. The fencing mapping have been mostly redone as well to prevent the stretching there was, but I missed some and will need to redo a few I did as well, think the mapping on some needs to be larger (well smaller, but larger in appearance) I have noticed a few cracks. This happened when I flow connected stuff after splitting the landscape, to do the blending, and missed to connect a few on the surrounding objects. I also noticed yesterday something seems wrong to the right side of the dottinger hohe, when you get nearby the paddock. Think I might have moved a vert or two on the z axis instead of xy... I will likely fiddle quite a bit with the blending, so you can expect things to change in future updates too. I also have a couple more textures made specially for nord by gametextures I need to put in. So far, only the curbs have been used out of the requested textures, I got some more nice fences style (2 I think), some road panels, but I dunno if I'll use them, as I cannot really use them as is, they are much too dark, they look like new tarmac. And the difference is minimal in game other than the texture being darker... seems like everything comes from the normal/spec maps which are detail maps in this case. So I wasn't seeing much difference in term of quality... And the guardrails too. I used those that were available on their website, and they looks pretty good, but I have some made specially to look more closely like those on the real track. Will need to do the mapping as well, since they are packaged in the same texture file, like the curbs. The blending on the road edges is done all around track, and the blending of the hills are done up to metz corner or so. At this point, the geometry can still be increased, and will need to on the hills on the rest of the track after metz, but the poly count is climbing much quicker in more dense area. There is also few spots where you will find grass that is blended with sand instead of the dirt texture it should be, as used on the road edges. I missed like 2-3 spots from my inspection yesterday... they are rather small. Hmm.... you might have also noticed much less flickering in the paddock area, it seems like a lot of duplicate faces was around... both in the terrain object this part was coming from, and from the building objects themselves, like the steps going into the cafe, they were both part of the road1141.gmt and the building object. I will need to look up the grasses and windowed fences on the cafe. There is flickering around those two spots. Oh and was almost forgetting, there is a lot of objects missing from the gp area, including the fences that should be on the left side when you make the right turn to go into nordkehre. (I'm now getting better with corner names in german ) I have no explanations for this, I noticed this a couple of days ago, when watching a replay, I noticed the brown building we used to see in the distance is missing, and raising the camera revealed an empty or almost empty gp area. So I will check this up as well, and reimport the stuff back in. So, that's about it for now! I hope your having a good time, the new panoz is a blast to drive! I love the controllable rear end on this car... also the new civic is loads of fun! Going full speed and drifting the whole schwedenkreuz is awesome! I really like this civic!
Regarding the flashing flags, I first thought it was like an animation to simulate movement, in a cheap way.. and at speed, it works actually, I first noticed them while moving and thought they were moving, but wasnt sure... but noticed they are indeed flashing, so they might be duplicate polys in the areas, I will check it out. Regarding the camp fires, I thought there were a nice addition. they are certainly not done up to current standard, but certainly better than not having them, they add animations, which there was none. i will check about making them a bit smaller and see... but I havent touched either the objects or textures of these 24h extra objects, so they appears as they were in rf1. I will work on the dust some more as well. With the new particles systems, I agree it is a bummer at times... but since I only hotlap, they aren't too much annoying for me, so I overlooked it. Regarding the comments on the grass, it is the same textures we had before, only resized to 2k instead of 4k. Everything else including mat definition is the same. So it is likely the new hdr engine showing it a bit more hdr. If you turn hdr off, you will enjoy a very life like experience Regarding the 24h circuit, I dunno.. Like I said, the area seems to come from another game or time frame than the rest of nord was made... the mesh is bad, there is no road edges, the tight bends also represent a real problem for me, I have no clue how to wire stuff properly in those spots, that's where I stopped working on it, if you open the scene in 3dsimed, you will see some work done on it. That doesnt mean I will never do it, but it's gonna be later, if it happens.
A thing about camp fires, some might actually be raised and floating... so when I will lower the floating stuff to ground, they might not appear as high as they are now? I dunno really, just a thought
