Would anyone have someway of having flag Marshall's instead of start lights?

[Lee Knight]

Sorry guy's, but pretty much as the tittle says....
Ive never made an Xpack & wouldn't know how & wondering if there's some way (an Xpack ive missed somehow?) I can have 'Ol;d School' field Marshal's flagging the cars off instead of a set of lights?
A gun noise (which I CAN provide) or a hand hooter/klaxon sound would be better than the normal chimes too- although not essential.....
Thanks in advance for any advice or directions provided!
BLeeK

(Edit/PS) Over-alls OR overcoat- doesn't really matter....
Something like the pit-bloke from WSC70 would be beautiful!
Anything else I'd be just as pleased with....

 

[Pangaea]

This sounds doable.... all u need is a 2 frame anim cutout of a Marshal, one with his arm up in the air (ready).. then the other with his arm down (go) .. you can then set it to trigger frame "2" when the game starts (you can time this yourself, then set the frame sequence accordingly) .. so assuming your anim is 1 frame a sec, and the greenlight is 5 seconds from when the track loads, you would have a sequence like this 0,0,0,0,1,1,1......etc etc 0= hand up 1= hand down
In terms of making the graphic itself, just grab a pic off the net of a Marshal, cut it out so its on a transparent background, then create two images of one with his hand up and the other hand down (a simple selection, copy, rotate in gfx software).. then of course save out as dds with an alpha value., pop into xpacker and set up your sequence there.

If your unsure how to create graphics/alpha there are posts on this forum that go into some detail.

best of luck.. sorry I cant actually make this for you.. a little busy atm with other things

 

[Kennett Ylitalo]

For what game? Race uses random timing in start countdown and i think it is the same with rFactor, RBR uses static timing interval. In Race it can vary from 1s to 5s. The animation needs to be triggered by the game itself. Not sure if it can be achieved, maybe some sort of magic trickery using the startlights instance, don't know.

 

[Kyle Puttifer]

For rFactor, see Brooklands 1937.

 

[R Soul]

If you look at some default start lights in 3dSimed, you may find it quite illuminating.

It seems that material names are the key. There just two gmts - startlight and startglow, but they each have multiple materials. I'll ignore the glow object for now and just talk about startlight.

Each red light has its own material (rdlta, rdltb etc). Look at the settings for rdlta. Texture: rdlt.dds, animation type: event, frequency: 1 (presumably 1 second), and sequence: 0,1,1,1,1,0.

I think the sequence means there are 6 frames. In the first frame, the material uses rdlt00.dds, in frames 2 - 5 it uses rdlt01.dds. In the 6th frame it goes back to rdlt00.dds because all the red lights go out. If you look at the other red light materials you'll see there are fewer 1s and more 0s, because the lights come on one after the other before all turning off.

All four green lights use the same material - grlta, whose sequence is 0,0,0,0,0,1, meaning it shows grlt00.dds until frame 6, when it then shows grlt01.dds.

The startglow object follows the same pattern, but I don't know if that's needed or if it's just for appearance.


For your flag man, you'll probably need your object to use two materials
The first should be called rdlta. Your frame images could be like this:
flagman00 - fully transparent texture
flagman01, flagman02 etc. - frames for raising the flag.

The second material should be called grlta
At the very least you'll need two texutres: dropflag00 (blank) and dropflag01 (flag lowered).
The sequence would be 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1 (depending on how many frames are needed for raising the flag).

This is where I have no idea what will happen. I'm guessing that rFactor starts the race when the final frame of grlta's animation is shown, but that's not how it works with a dropped flag. Everyone goes when it starts to fall, not when it's finished.

I should point out that I haven't put any of the above into practice. I just looked at it in 3dSimed and tried to find a pattern. Time for you to experiment.

edit: I just looked at Brooklands myself, and the animation just has two red flag frames, with it being held up for a few seconds.

 

[Raido]

There are animated flag marshalls in rF Macau (in the hairpin), not waving the cars off for the start though.

 

[Kennett Ylitalo]

Thanks R Soul, that was very illuminating (nice pun btw..)