Track Safety Lights

Hi

im trying to get safety lights to work around a track (green,yellow,blue etc)...is there an instance or material i must name to get this to happen?

cheers in advance

 

i think cautionlight and cautionlightglow still work.

 

yes they do for yellows (and ive used the trick texture to get green working)...but i was hoping to replace the flag marshalls with lights that do local yellows, blues etc

 

Yeah, I tried that too but don't think there's any materials implemented yet for local yellows or blue flags.

I requested it once before, maybe you could do so again. I believe the "digiflags" that also cropped up in F1 recently are quite important for night racing in particular, when you can hardly even see the marshals. If we ever get to run proper night races at say Spa or Le Mans those are must haves.

There might be a way to "trick build" them, if you do an "animation" that just replaces (moves into/out of the picture) the color of the digiflag depending on the situation, as the hooks for flag animation must be there to make the marshals work. I couldn't get that to work some months ago though and haven't tried since then.

 

No offence, but I've been to the 24h of spa 4 times.
-2007 only saturday, during daylight
-2010 all weekend
-2011 only saturday, both day and night
-2012 all weekend

And last year they had some orange traffic lights at some places that they could switch on, but the years before I don't recall seeing that. I have seen some marshall posts with a very small flashing light, but they mainly used some sort of 'flashlight' (don't know if that's the proper word ) that they aimed at some sort of yellow board (like this, bit bigger, etc.)

instead of using flags. So basicly what I'm trying to say, if you want a proper spa, you probably shouldn't have these "digiflags" (or only very limited, and different ones then seen in F1 )

Also, I don't recall seeing these "digiflags" during le mans??? But I haven't seen to much of that, only limited time on the television


EDIT :: realise I might be bit off topic..... Even though off course it isn't always realisitc, the feature would be nice to have anyway.....

 

@ Ethone...just letting you know i got the lights to be fully functional just like the cornerworkers...heres what i did

Material Name = marshalflag

Instance = cornerworker_001,2,3 as per normal following the path around the track (do not use any .anims in these instances)

i then made 11 dds textures for my lights following the flag order of the attached zip at bottom of post

i then followed how ISI have the marshalflag material setup which is as follows...



i then put it in game and it all works greens,yellows,local yellows,blues etc etc


hope this helps you or someone in the future

cheers

 

This is pretty smart! thanks!!

 

I'm going to try that out, that's even better than the animation workaround I tried. Thanks!

 

This is so great I want to give you a hug Jim.

I got them to work in parallel to the normal marshals by naming the material marshalflag2 and pointing the animation maps to cautionlightA[00-10].dds, working like a charm. I also just continued the cornerworker_xxx from the last number I gave the regular marshals and the digiflags were both functional and recognizing their location correctly.

 

Excellent news mate...feels good to have a win for a change, restores the faith lol

 

Great piece of work Jim! Thank you for sharing.

 

Question: Is it possible to have the light flash on/off, or is it restricted to a static light?

 

i dont think you could get them to flash as you have to follow the flag order and sequence for them to show correctly ,if you stray from that to get a flash you might get a red when it should be a yellow etc lol

 

You could try meddling with the animation sequence, adding in new base stages (i.e. the empty base texture) after each colored stage. Perhaps the hooks are tied to the stage, not the animation sequence.

Alternatively, you could work around it by having another poly in front of the marshalflag poly and put another animated material of the base texture on it, using transparency with one stage fully opaque and the other fully transparent. That might give you z-sorting issues so check the decal tag in the GMT Instances rollout.

 

Thanks for the ideas. Another thing I noticed is that all green lights seem to be on while driving a lap. I thought green was supposed to be on only after a local yellow. (This is how the flag marshals work when testing at Sepang, only the local yellow and greens are active, all others are passive) Did I do something wrong, or is this how it is supposed to work?

EDIT: While looking at Sepang, I noticed that the marshalflag material animation sequence goes from 0 through 11, not 10 as I had. Weird thing is that there is no marshalflag11.dds in Sepang but the track loads fine anyway, while mine did not. The 11:th sequence didn't make any difference though.

 

hi Jim, would like to give you a huge amount of "honor points", but the system dont work anymore ....

when will we see the flags on a track? do you have a video to make us happy meanwhile ?

 

there is 12 textures all up 000-010=11 ....and the 1st texture without a number (marshalflag.dds) which i think is a "dummy" and is skipped by the game ....i made mine green but maybe if you make it without colour it will work as you wanted above...not sure tbh

 

hi mate glad you like the idea...i have a loooong way to go before my track is ready for a video though lol

Im hoping Feels puts this into his Interlagos so we can recreate the "Vettel Flag Incident" of 2012

 

Hey jim check out the pit exit lights that come from the same game they flash blue when someone is coming exiting the pitlane



.... unless you have them flashing already