GTC-65 300SL VS GT350 @ Spa - Tuesday March 30th 2010

[Carlos Diaz]

Servername: RACEDEPT.COM GTC65
Class: Shelby GT350 vs Mercedes 300SL
Track: Spa Francorchamps
Start Time: 19.00 GMT
Practice: 20 min
Qualification: 10 min (1 timed lap only)
Race: 2 x 8 laps
Note1: Click here to read the password and golden rules!
Note2: We will be using a skinpack that includes liveries for both cars. You can download it HERE.
Note2: You must choose a different make of car for each race. The order in which you drive them will be assigned based on the order of sign-ups. Starting with the 300SL for myself, and alternating onwards down the list.

 

[Senad Subasic]

The game froze for me during quali 2 now. I waited till the quali timer went to 0, hoping that I'll be switched to the race, but nothing. Apologies if I kept you waiting.

As far as the race went, it sucked .

Lap 1, nice start, no contacts, we lined up nicely for Eau Rouge. Unfortunately, stepped on the accelerator too hard in Les Combes, spun out. Then went wide in turn 12. Forgot about the fuel load I guess. Lap 1 = last place

After that, was trailing Jack for quite some time, and made some mistakes trying to overtake him. I caught up with him without problems, but had trouble passing without contact. It was quite cool, I was faster in the corners (300SL), and he left me behind on the straights (GT350). Eventually, I was right behind him, he missed the apex in the last corner, went wide, and I passed in front.

The remaining laps were consistent, but slow, ended up 10 or 15 seconds behind 12th, I think.

 

[Carlos Diaz]

Guys, I need to know who were the ones having trouble with the skins tonight. I know so far Amir, Lenno, and Kris were having issues. Who else?

How did you guys install the pack? Did u unzip/extract the archive into your GTL directory and choose to overwrite the "GameData" folder?

Or did you try to extract the archive into the Merc and GT350 folders?

 

[Bob Hutchins]

Yet again top event Carlos, loved the merc, hated the 350. Had lots to fun in race one & also learnt a bit too. race 2 got a DQ, bloody shelbey.

Anyways, thanks Carlos, Rd and all the guys that showed up. Grts to Amir for both race wins, grts all podium finishers.

P.s. shame we couldn't use the custom skins, would have been a better grid for it.

 

[Bob Hutchins]

Guys, I need to know who were the ones having trouble with the skins tonight. I know so far Amir, Lenno, and Kris were having issues. Who else?

How did you guys install the pack? Did u unzip/extract the archive into your GTL directory and choose to overwrite the "GameData" folder?

Or did you try to extract the archive into the Merc and GT350 folders?

As always, I extract into a temp folder & then copy across to relevant folders. All good for me.

 

[Tom Wilson]

As promised the replay from race 1

http://www.mediafire.com/?otndjogytzz

The last couple of laps are awesome. In summary I had an amazing start and had a good lead on lap one and from then one I was swamped by the chase pack.

I settled for second after a simply amazing battle where anyone from 5 drivers could have one the race on the final lap.

Grats to Amir for the double win, and thanks for Carlos for running the event.

 

[Gary Lennon]

Loved both races in both cars,a surprise podium with the Merc as it really closed up tight on the last lap with a gang of 2 Mercs and 3 Stangs in a battle-pack ).
Front row with the Stang in race2 just behind Amir Merc,so ofcourse i arrived at Au Rouge in the lead ;p,but got lary going in the busstop and Amir nipped through,i clung on and took it back down the first straight,but outbraked myself at the end of it and went off,not too much lost but Amir made good of the gap and i think the race was lost there,but i hung in there as best i could and managed to close up for a close finish.
Grats Amir good job both races,well done all podiums and ofcourse all finishers.

Thank You Carlos & RD

 

[Stuart Thomson]

I unzipped the files stright into the folders, and no problems here, either.

 

[Warren Dawes]

Guys, I need to know who were the ones having trouble with the skins tonight. I know so far Amir, Lenno, and Kris were having issues. Who else?

How did you guys install the pack? Did u unzip/extract the archive into your GTL directory and choose to overwrite the "GameData" folder?

Or did you try to extract the archive into the Merc and GT350 folders?

I didn't try to log in with a skin since there were reports of problems, so only used default. My skin pack seemed ok though, and I installed by unzipping to a temporary directory and copying the relevant files across, same way I always do it.

 

[Warren Dawes]

Thanks for a good event Carlos, these cars don't get used much. Nice to have another run in the Merc cruiser, and this is one of the few tracks where it is well suited and was more than competitive with the GT350. It's better braking and superior handling made up for the lack of acceleration.

I was caught out by the earlier start (Euro winter time change) and only just made it in time, so virtually no practice.

Race 1: Merc: Qualy P4 but was outdragged by Bob off the line (no surprises there). I sneaked that spot back by the end of the long uphill stretch, thanks for the inside room Bob, very gentlemanly of you. Had some top racing with Bob for a while but then opened a gap and was hoping the 3 Shelby's in front might chew up their tyres. Sure enough, towards the end I had P3 and caught the leaders but couldn't find a way around Tom's swaying GT350. This allowed David and Gary to join the fray and the 5 of us had a helter skelter scramble to the finish, but I lost out to finish P5.

Race 2: GT350: Not one of my favourites, but sounds nice. Qualy P5 but gained spots to P3 early.Great racing for a while with Stuart, David, and Tom. Stu spun at Les Coombs, and I then opened a comfy gap in P3. I could hang on to Gary ahead but not gain much due to small boo boo's and eventually put the car into the wall at Les Coombs, so struggled home for P3.

Thanks guys, always fun in GTL.

 

[Roman Kruszewski]

It was a disaster....
I got on server and Carlos asked us to remove all custom skins, after doing so I had 0 out 312 cars. I decided to copy my /gamedata/ from archive to restore order, but it caused my GTL to crash to desktop, and then I couldn't get it going.
My last chance was to restore my GTL from zip - I very much advice You to make an archive with Your working GTL. It worked, I got on server just when the session was changing to race.
So I was last on the grid, unfortunately I made my "rescue copy" with no sounds, so I drove mute then when I approached Bus Stop, pop-up window of my Antyvir minimized GTL when I got back my Mustang was crashed into the wall with dead engine

R2: I got off the grid pretty quick but someone in front me was slower and blocked me, then I made mistake together with with Kris we visited the gravel...
After this I was chasing wild overtaking Jack and Hans, clocking my PB at 3.01.8. After Stu's spin I was in eye contact but he was quicker and I couldn't match his pace. Then I made a mistake in Eau Rouge hitting wall and again I met Kris who suffered same bad luck as me. With one lap to go I again missed braking point and was overtaken by Kris

Thanks for this Combo - Mercedes is really nice car to drive, I hadn't that much time to try Mustang.

So till thursday!

 

[Senad Subasic]

Agreed, 300SL was great. I expected trouble when I first tried to drive it, but it wasn't that bad in the end. Need more GTL experience .

Also, kudos to the guys up front, I can't imagine driving these cars cleanly in a pack for that long.

 

[Carlos Diaz]

I'm really sorry about everything you went through Roman. And thanks for having patience and sticking around.

How did you end up deleting all the cars though? I think Kris did something similar, cuz he was having trouble loading Hans and Senad and they were both in default cars.

You think it would help if I put "RD" in the name of the addon car folders? That way if we run into any trouble we just go in there and delete the car folders that begin with "RD". This should minimize any chances of deleting the default cars.

I had setup next Tuesday's event (GT40s) before last night's race. I included the use of a skinpack cuz there is only one default skin for that car. Had I known we were going to have this much trouble I would have just ran without the skinpack.
I am afraid that we might have a similar incident next event. The club races are supposed to be easier to access and race in. You know, run smoother. If we have this happen again next week I will suspend the use of addon skins for a while until I figure out what it is I'm doing wrong with the packs. It's got to be me, cuz Stu has the sprintpack and the RDHGP pack and no one has trouble with those. Not to mention all the skins being used with the Cats on fridays and again no one has troubles. So this has to be something I'm missing somewhere.

I apologize to you all for the inconvenience. I want you to know that I will be working to find a solution soon so we could have nice varied grids but without the headaches.

 

[Kris Leeten]

Concerning the skins: I open the rar/zip file, noticed the gamedata folder and dragged this into my GTL root folder (as it always worked before). The problem was that I couldn't select the default 807 & 880 cars while the folders where still present in the Shelby 350 folder When opening the GTL Car Tool it gave ma a lot of errors on the added skins for the Shlby & Merc, no idea why, but they were all listed double, even after I checked the folders where everything seemed ok)
Reinstalled GTL completely in 5 minutes (with update & skinpack, I was aiming to do this for the league anyway, Altbierbude flooded my GTL folder)
After this I had no issues entering the server (everyone was running default skins by then) Once again a very big thank you for your patience!

All this hassle robbed me from any practice laps so my first lap in the 350 was the opening lap of race 1. I knew I had to brake on time and I even survived the first corners but Pouhon got me. While in the litter I got some hits from other offroaders When I re-entered I got a race against the clock (or trying to bite of time of the driver in front) I got up to 10 seconds from Hans and reached & 3.03 Not bad in my oppinion.

Race2; Now I had an idea of what to expect so with the help of Carlos' setup and 3 practice laps I qualified in a 10th pos I believe.
It was really great to have some others around me, especially chasing Bob in the first laps was spectacular! I kept it steady and took very little risks and gained some spots from drivers crawling out of the litter. Then Stuart passed by - nice & clean but very close as always- and I tried to chase him. This worked out pretty well and I even reached a PB with the Merc: 3.01.138 Not bad at all I would say. Unfortunately I didn't notice my tiretemp raising to temperatures more suitable in hell. After Stuart flew of in Pouhon (the long double lefthander) I smiled from ear to ear, only to hit the wall myself a lap later when entering Eau Rouge with to much confidence. This was a pretty hard crash and it made me drop at least 4 places. (Roman: I thought you had crashed due to me blocking the track, hence the waiting)
A real miracle nobody hit me as I was in the middle of the race-line to my feeling.

I can't help blaming myself for not being there on time to have at least some practice with the Shelby, it would have been so much more fun.

Thanks to Carlos for this great selection on this fabulous track! Thanks to all participants and see you all soon!

 

[Stuart Thomson]

@Kris - I meant to post up about it, but I've found GTL Car Tool doesn't work that great to be honest. I've got rid of it, myself.

What Car Tool does it to rename all the *.car files to something like *.carx or *.xcar. The game needs to read those *.car files to populate the garages, so if you set Car Tool to only have GT350's and 300SL's in game, every other car gets it's *.car file changed.

But, when Car Tool gets baffled by add-ons, it stops the renaming back at the point that it gets confused, so you can end up with loads of cars, even the default ones, not showing up in-game.

What I've done is to copy a default Teams folder away, containing all the default cars, and also a modified Teams folder containing the just mod cars. That way I can "hot swap" the cars in the event as required.

@ Carlos - I'm always very, very wary of collating skinpacks from various sources, because there is little or no standardised methodology of implementation across a group of skin producers. Often they have links to wheelsets, or other little quirks that they haven't documented fully - not that you haven't done your research properly, but that no matter what you look at, you're on a hiding to nothing because they haven't told you what things they're actually doing and using.

I do actually have a GT40 skinpack ligging about on my hard drive somewhere, it was ready for re-packing into the smaller format. It's got about 8 or 9 skins in it, all created by me so it's standardised and simple - and happily, we've used them in the past without any issue. If you want I can whack it back up in the next couple of days for you to have shufty at?

 

[Warren Dawes]

That reminds me of one important point re addon skins.
You will have noted that Stuart has included a RD logo with all of his skins, which appears in the selection screen to identify it as a RD addon skin. This is quite important to avoid people getting caught using personal addon skin and causing others to be locked out of servers. eg. if someone races with another community who have addon skins, people can get confused about which ones are ok to use on a specific server.
To avoid all those issues, Stu has included the RD logo, so there is no excuse for picking an incorrect skin for RD events.

 

[Carlos Diaz]

I had a feeling about the extra wheels and stuff that I had to remove from many of the skins I got from 3rd parties to make them slimmer. I wondered if it would cause problems. Guess I know now huh lol? Thanks for your input on that Stu. And thanks too for the Car Tool info.

And yes, I would love to use your GT40 skinpack, sir.

You are right Warren, I forgot that many of us don't only race here. I overlooked that detail. I will be identifiying any skins as RD skins from now on. I am also going to skin my own cars from now on, that way I can make sure that I know exactly what is going into the folders. But be ready for some plain looking skins lol!

Thanks so much for your input guys, it's extremely welcomed (actually needed) since I am still learning and have a long way to go.

Anyone who has already downloaded my skinpack for the GT40s next week, please remove it. I will be updating the event post with the link to Stu's pack as soon as it's available. Sorry and thank you.

 

[Roman Kruszewski]

I'm really sorry about everything you went through Roman. And thanks for having patience and sticking around.

Carlos luckily it all ended good, but I was angry and hopeless and I already started to write a "give up post" with resigning from this event and even from RDHGP S5 and deleting whole GTL directory.
Then I tried the recover GTL from archive and everything worked again - damn I was pleased I simple like these oldtimers and could not miss these events at RD
So or so there always are problems with additional skins/cars, look at previous event at Limerock where I couldn't choose other car then Beemer and I still don't know what problem is?
Deleting each car - same problem occured ofr me with Abrth 1000 TCR - is there any solution for this problem? Hope that on test race for RDHGP everything works.

 

[Carlos Diaz]

I hope we can get everything sorted out by the test time. Wouldn't want to lose a driver to technical woes.

Hope we can keep you from writing that "I give up" post.

 

[Stuart Thomson]

What I've done is to copy a default Teams folder away, containing all the default cars, and also a modified Teams folder containing the just mod cars. That way I can "hot swap" the cars in the event as required.

I honestly reckon that this is the best way to go if you're having problems.

1. Skinpacks (if created as simply as possible) will not affect peoples log ons unless they don't have them installed. For the RDHGP, I'm going to be tweaking all of the 3rd party skins so they are as basic as possible, rather than just putting the external cars into the pack. It takes longer, but it's worth the trouble.

2. Mod cars can affect some people's installs but it's not affecting everyones, so it's something at the user end. (I know that in Vista onwards you should avoid installing GTL into the Program Files folder, for instance). Uninstalling vehicles also helps when people are getting forced into a car they are not expecting, so we know that it's not changing something during install time outside of the Car folder itself, becuase removing the car allows other cars to then be selected.

 

[Ross McGregor]

No problems with the mod cars for me last night. Enjoyed the event, had a battle with carlos in both races, in race one we were separated by around 2s for a few laps until he spun at la source (i think) and i just finished ahead in 8th after his recovery drive.
Race 2: the start saw some good sensible driving going into eau rouge, with a lot of side by side action, and while battling for 7th, carlos and another spun at the hairpin again which must've distracted me, (ran out of talent) as i shifted down 2 gears in quick succession, spinning me round, and dropping me to 10th. Focused on doing clean laps from then on and got lucky overtaking a couple of spinners, and eventually finished 8th behind carlos.
In my opinion the cars were quite closely matched, so definitely a good choice. Also, after adjusting the throttle/brake sensitivity on my pedals i feel i was slightly more competitive last night, still to get the hang of this trail-braking lark though, but i'll continue to join you guys as often as possible as the cars are awesome and the racing fair! Cheers for organising this carlos