I've played many top-down racing games before and can't really get free of their charme. MRO or the more modern Real World Racing game are really fascinating - at least for me! So I just played with the idea to make a top-down mod for rF2. I know...this is somewhat "strange" from the point of view to use a real simulation game and engine to build an arcade game upon it. Anyway, I like the idea and just want to give it a try The following screenshot was just taken from the game without any change, just positioning the free move camera into a top-down perspective. So now I'm just wondering what would be needed to get the top-down feeling into rF2!? A track with a default top-down TV-camera or maybe better a car with a default top-down camera. But would it be possible to fix the camera in a north-south orientation while the car is turning? What would be needed to get a more arcadish physic for this mod? ...Questions upon questions! For more inspiration on this topic you may have a look here and here Finally now I'm really curious what reactions will follow on this topic and who may be interested in giving some constructive input Cheers!
I think it would be best to mod a track. Delete all cameras and make 1 camera, set it very very high above middle of track. This camera would need to have a high zoom lens setting to zoom down on the car. When a player drives the car they need press the Page Down button to get this camera view. That's it I guess, unless you want to mod the car too to make it easier to drive as it would be hard as nails to drive. try the track LongFord, I think this track already has something like this, you need press PageDown a few times to get this view.
thx for the input at least some tracks have this helicopter camera but I guess all of them aren't fixed into a north-south direction...but I will take a closer look later oh and of course the cars will need to be moded..but I guess this wont be a big issue I guess it will be much harder to get something like a trackmap plus corner annoucements or an fast line display...
I just tried the camera editor in dev mode...it's really complicated and non user friendly Is there any other tool or maybe a comprehensive tutorial on the camera editing?
Made some further investigations and I'm afraid to say that rF seems to be not capable of fixing the cameras to a north-south direction. This will make it hard to generate the right feeling Above this it seems to be much easier just to make whole new game (e.g. with the Unity game engine) instead of making a rF2 mod. Anyhow I think I will keep the whole idea in my mind but go further with other works, especially my R/C mod
For say, a swingman camera, you can set the middle value to 0, i.e. something like OrientationRate=(1.4, 0, 0), and I think more or less you have what you want, you might also want to set the first value to 0 for hills. I think that's what you're after?
In principle this is the solution...BUT the camera is connected to the car so every movement will cause jitter now tried several settings and combinations but didn't found any solution for this Above this if you switch to a different car by pressing the - or + key, the camera orientation will be reset to the actual car. This way the north-south-direction is lost. Even if you are pressing the numblock enter the orientation will be reset. Any further ideas on this? I really hoped this top-down perspective would be achievable with a trackside camera because they only focus on the car but don't follow it's movements like the onboard cams...
by accident I found a solution for one of my problems xD first the camera jittered so driving was really hard...now I found an other mod which has a helicopter onboard-cam which hadn't any jitter (sidenote I'm working with rF1 as I haven't properly prepared my moddev install from rF2 yet) here is a little preview-video! but a new problem occurred as now the perspective is strange (zoomed out by FOV, not by offset etc.) so side objects do look distorted anyhow this could be compensated with special tracks used for top-down-racing I will keep playing with the values, so maybe I even find a better setting for the camera