Released Hondsrugring

[Kris Vickers]

How big's your track folder so far buddy?

 

[Erwin Greven]

in BTB 449 MB, in rFactor 306 MB

 

[Kris Vickers]

Holy crap lol

I thought mine was pushing it at 130mb. Mind you, yours is a huge track

Have you tried putting your textures and objects into MAS files yet?

I couldn`t get it to work for me, damn thing

 

[Erwin Greven]

Haven't tried it either. I want to try first to make groups of the tso's, so it should make the objects to load faster while racing. When the day switches to night, the lighting causes the framerate to drop fast.

 

[Erwin Greven]

Has someone and idea to solve these problems?

Now there are still a few bugs for wich i cannot find the sollution.

1. In the rear view mirror the track seems to disappear sometimes. (only the Road Light xpack has this problem)

2. When racing at night at a certain place on the track, Gasselternijveen, the car seems to hit invisible objects. They are at random places but mostly between the 2nd and 5th chicane and very close to the 2nd corner after the bridge in Gasselternijveen.
In the video at (2.30 and around 2.38)

3. The switch between day and night is slowing the framerate extremely. I think it has to do with the lighting to calculate wich has to get light and wich not.

4. The horizon is missing a file i think. There is a gap between the sky and the surface. In the gap i can see the background of an rFactor menu.

 

[woochoo]

Has someone and idea to solve these problems?

Hey Erwin, the track looks good.

1. the mirror problem: to fix it i think you'll need to split the track into a new .gmt section by simply adding a new road surface section, it needs a new material section, you don't have to change the texture, just make a new section i think.

in my case there were invisible sections at either end of the section that was too long, so somewhere in between i made a new section and that fixed it.

3. you'll probably have to be quite selective with what objects recieve light, and how many lights there are in each area. the fps issue will probably be amplified by how many shadow objects there are and their levels as well. evening = shadows + lights = fps hog

4. the skybox: are you using the default btb sky.mas? the top of the textures on horizon.gmt aren't reaching the bottom of the sky.gmt so the transparent area shows the rF background. is your track at some massive elevation where you can see down into the gap between the sky and the smaller radius of horizon.gmt? my track max height is around 160m and it was a problem. you can adjust settings in the .scn file

Instance=skyboxi
{
  Moveable=True
  MeshFile=skyboxi.gmt CollTarget=False HATTarget=False Render=False
  Pos=(0.0,-15.0,0.0) Orient=(0.0,0.0,0.0) // move and rotate whole skybox if required

where mine says "-15.0" is the height, which moved it down, but i had also moved the textures up, so you might need a +ve value. you might be able to move just the horizon by putting the "Pos=" line in the horizon instance, but i'm not sure.

i've also had problems hitting invisible objects. The collsions seem to happen adjacent to brake markers and similar tso. i'm going to make a basic non-rendered collision column for them and set the actual brake markers as non-collide. it might work.

i hope at least some of this works for you

 

[Erwin Greven]

Will let you know if the fixes work.

 

[Erwin Greven]

2. When racing at night at a certain place on the track, Gasselternijveen, the car seems to hit invisible objects. They are at random places but mostly between the 2nd and 5th chicane and very close to the 2nd corner after the bridge in Gasselternijveen.
In the video at (2.30 and around 2.38)

I found out that the lighting poles were set on collide. So also the light beams were collidable. That caused the cars to be out of shape.

3. you'll probably have to be quite selective with what objects recieve light, and how many lights there are in each area. the fps issue will probably be amplified by how many shadow objects there are and their levels as well. evening = shadows + lights = fps hog

I reduced the amount of tso's that receives lighting and it worked out very well. I just did a 10 lap test between night and day. The switch (lights on/ lights off) was smooth.

 

[Erwin Greven]

4. the skybox: are you using the default btb sky.mas? the top of the textures on horizon.gmt aren't reaching the bottom of the sky.gmt so the transparent area shows the rF background. is your track at some massive elevation where you can see down into the gap between the sky and the smaller radius of horizon.gmt? my track max height is around 160m and it was a problem. you can adjust settings in the .scn file

I also worked on this one. I had to set it too on -15. It solved the problem!!

 

[woochoo]

I'm glad you got some of the stuff sorted Erwin

 

[Erwin Greven]

A small question:

Latitude = 53 // degs from Equator (range: -90 to 90, positive is Northern Hemisphere)
NorthDirection = 245 // the direction of North in degrees (range: 0 to 359)
RaceDate = September 29 // default date for the race

What is the difference between Latitude and NorthDirection?
My track is situated around
52.950226,6.82706

Also it looks as if my track is situated on the Southern hemisphere instead of the Northern.

 

[woochoo]

I think north direction is the orientation of the track. AFAIK, if you have made your track with North pointing up in BTB, then you should have your north direction as "0". Seems to work for me. It's a rotational offset i guess. Understandably that effects the position of the sun, but i've read that in GTR2 at least, and possibly rF, that any value other than 245 will cause problems with the alignment of the sun and shadows or something like that. I didn't read it all because it seems just fine in my track.

a value of 53 would place your track in the northern hemisphere, so it looks like you're ok with that one. -53 would have you at best on the very southern tip of South America, otherwise in the ocean.

 

[Erwin Greven]

taking a small break now. Will continue to work on the track next month.

 

[Erwin Greven]

This is the track as it is now. Version 0.8.8.0.

In this package: the btb project file and the rFactor export.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/1t2tziomxto/Hondsrugring.zip

 

[Ryan Callan]

Looking forward to having a go

You really should use 7zip though Erwin . Your exported track is just 64MB with 7z.

 

[Erwin Greven]

will look at it. used windows xp zip.

 

[Ryan Callan]

Looks very nice though Erwin, I can only imagine the amount of work that goes into a trrack this size, defo one for the fast cars

 

[Erwin Greven]

It is a very fast track and therefore it suits fast cars better than low performance cars. But there will be also a chicane version of this track.

But first there are some problems i have to solve before the final release. (version 1.0.0.0) And that is to get the frame rate higher and i have to get familiar with sketchup. There are some topics about this at this forum and i have some time still.

In a BMW F1 a 5.41 min is possible.

 

[Erwin Greven]

I thought i solved the night-day switch.. but sadly i did not.

it still freezes when the lights switches on or out. I think i have to uncheck "receiving light" on all the TSO's near by the lights.

 

[Kris Vickers]

Is there no way of having only the near-by lights switch on? instead of for the whole track?

Might be worth looking into?