Thanks for your quick comments! I'm happy you like the track so far. Also, negative feedback will be appreciated too
To answer some of your feedback:
- yes, the road is narrow - first of all I tried to make something like I saw on the videos. The second - I wanted to build some track that would be different of what we had before. There's no accounting for tastes though... Making it wider is not possible now - I spent the whole month positioning terrain's vertexes - no more, thanks!
- for directions on the route - again I tried to get close to the mood of real world like on the movies. You know, in Poland drivers usually know stages very well, so they even could drive without co-driver
That was my idea to make it a little confusing and I see it works
Anyway, I'll maybe put some things here and there that will tell "better not drive here"
- Polish roads are in bad condition very often, not only rally stages (!) - some friends of mine who are real rally drivers told me that my track is almost perfect if speaking of roughness, surface condition and such things.
- I really had an idea of making this track almost right after I bought BTB one year ago. Then I knew nothing of BTB, track building, methods etc. This is really the third version - the last one (I will of course do updates I mentioned).
Many ideas and observations taugth me how important the optimization is, especially for bigger tracks with many objects. One idea was to limit the number of materials as much as possible. That's way I had to use texture sheets for objects. Since I'm not able to extract objects from original RBR stages, and from the other hand I've learned some 3d creating - I liked some of the original objects and make quite close copies of them myself. I also won a possibility to mix my own textures with existing models and modyfing them was just a cheescake
So I took some of the vegetation from original sheets, added my own materials form my photos, place everything on my sheets and made my models of the vegetation. The same with buildings. If you look on objects/vege textures - most everything you don't know is mine
I like it very much too have something of my own in my track.
- Road/terrain textures: it's actually 3 kinds of gravel (+ 2 crossovers), 2 tarmacs and one junction (the first one is just big square with painted road and terrain) - that's it
I was very happy that bump maps added some more details to the roads. Then for now there are two patches that cover some impossible track merging, I will add two more with some skidmarks etc. - there's still place on the texture of them
The textures are made by me, they are mixtures of some from cgtextures.com and my photos/editing
The same with terrain - the main grass is from Default XPack, mixed with my shots, one texture I took directly form some other track (I hope the Creator will not be angry at me), the brown field (Ground11) is from some Czech track - modified, Ground10 directly from cg, bare_grass and grassForest are from my shots. This makes 15 textures altogether + one junction
Then I used terrain materials blending of course.
Backgrounds are all mine. Maybe they could be bigger size, but I was crazy about optimizing, so I made them small. When you jump into trees in forest, you can see that they are little blured. Then I'll say my track is for driving, not for sightseeing
- Framerates: my notebook is not fast any longer today - Core2 Duo 2 Ghz, 4 GB RAM, NVidia 8600M GT 512 Mb on Win XP SP3, so that always makes me to think of optimizing things as much as I can. I have mostly 60-65 pfs, 55-60 in forests, then I have no damn idea WHY it slows down on that first junction from tarmac into the forest. Just for 2 seconds, but drops down to 35... grrr! Making this big junction on one texture was one of my tries - nothing really changed (maybe +2 fps) - good thing for me it looks now much better
Some track stats:
- 28 170 objects, including over 1500 collision cones. I really cannot say how many objects are in SObjects... Average LOD Out for objects (omit collisions) = 180 - very unprecise, but that's what BTB says now.
- 34 000 terrain's polygons (29 500 are driveable and collidable). Average LOD Out for driveable areas = 240
I think I've reached some limit for my machine. There were 2200 collision cones - I got probably crazy and wanted to make almost every tree you can reach collidable - in that case my fps were 55 instead of 60 - a big deal, right? Collision cones have just 3 faces and have LOD Out = 1...
Look at the size of the file 'objectlist.ini', or better open it with notepad - you don't have to - it says at the top: count=6104 which means roads + walls + terrains + objects + SObjects = everything...
I think my track shows how important is optimization and how many aspects it has.
Still, I'm going to check everything once again and try to make it better. I don't have to promise since I'm devoted to this track as it was my first big work. Without BTB I would never even think of making such thing
If anybody is interested, I will share with all my xpacks I used in the track - textures, objects, walls. One little problem is with vegetation since it's not perfect technically (e.g. red dots ouside of the trunks, unnessarily grouped faces in Sketchup which causes splitting one object for more in BTB etc.). I will make new and much better xpack with trees I used there - also for my future, so I need to ask you for some patience with it.
Thanks again for your comments, I really enjoy that people download it
m.
