BTB Improvements?

[Brendon Pywell]

Believe it or not, I get quite a few emails with suggestions on how BTB could be improved. Rather than me simply “sorting” them in my own Inbox, I’d like to openly ask the BTB community for their suggestions, allowing suggestions to be discussed and workshopped. I have a few ideas (pages of them) myself but it's always refreshing to get other people's ideas.

Aside from the next patch, I pretty much know what I am going to include in the next version. Beyond that I also have some great ideas as I address what I perceive to be BTB’s most common “annoyances”.

So please, feel free to offer your ideas on what you’d like to see in the upcoming releases. I’ll refrain from comment, but I will be taking notes.

 

[frasie]

Hello!
I use BTBEvo and I am very happy with this great Tool!
Many thanks to Mr. Brendon!
The only think I miss is the Blender Tool I have seen in BTBPro,
This was very cool to have also in Evo.
Greetings, Franky

 

[R Soul]

I don't think the Evo renderer supports texture blending, hence the lack of that tool in BTB.

I'd like the ability to tell BTB not to export tracks that whose visibility I've disabled.

 

[SmashingPants67]

Support for Game Stock Car, Game Formula Truck, "1/4 mile" track type (with checkpoints at 60ft, 100m, 201m, 301m and finish at 402m) and "xsector1001, xsector2002 and xfinish1001" for Point-to-Point track type. Texture converter that converts textures to DDS DXT1 and let you choose an "image crop", all square on power of 2 (256x256, 512x512). On another post I've suggested the "Texture Converter".

 

[RichardHessels]

Scaling textures never looks as good as making sure the textures sizes are right before you import them.
nVidia DDS tool won't even let you save to DDS if the texture is not a power of 4.
There tons of other options i would like to see first.

 

[Lee Knight]

An automated licensing service so we don't have to wait for Piddy to click a button & make licenses available.
Once the details are sent it shouldn't then take long for a license to be returned.
This would also free up Piddy's time to concentrate on family, work & BTB's evolution...

 

[R Soul]

We have SObjects. What about GObjects? A grid of objects, with the same allowance for randomness that SObjects have. At the moment we can click and drag in an area to create lots of objects, but the only way to change the density is to delete them all and start again.

 

[goibaka]

BUGs on 0.9.0.2

- Wrong importing from Longitudinal, Latitude, Height. Now, we aren't able import example file. On BTB 0.8.0.3 It worked perfectly.

Suggestion for new features:

- Have installed both BTBs (0.8.0.3 and 0.9 with same licence)
- Move nodes and Control Points: Geometry aligning like straight lines and circles
- Walls and Objects properties: Add new feature to Cast Shadow for custom sizes (512x512, 1024x512, 128,256, etc,..)
- Walls: normal smoothing: Add new feature for normals by face, auto or custum angle smoothing. It's very useful due to quite long walls can look with bad normals.
- Walls: Add UVMapping edit same 3dsmax. It will be so useful and It will safe material account because we can have in alone texture several signs, marks, logos, etc,...
- Walls: Add cover/cap at start and end of our walls
- Terrain Panels: It has number max to 4, It would be interesting up to 10 or higher. It would be useful to make new modern track like Paul Ricard HTT.
- Material edition: To Solve the "ImageList" problem in heavy projects
- Edit Materials: Add new shaders such as Cube map
- Surfaces material: Add Custom angle
- Surfaces Blend: Add Blend with Alpha channel. Very usefult.
- Export: Add export option for roads to CSV file.
- Export to rFactor2.
- Zoom: Add Full view on center screen.
- Finally, I Think more important, looking for one better way merge tracks. May be good way add cutter line at end road.

Thanks.

 

[RichardHessels]

If Brendon want to add all options described here to our wishlist he be going down under again for another several years...

 

[SmashingPants67]

Export to Game Stock Car, Game Formula Truck and Need for Speed: Shift/NFSS2U (unpacked version).

 

[Erwin Greven]

@Richard Hessels :
Some wishes are even exports to non simbin games.
I rather have:
Features that help the track building itself.
Features that improve performance.

 

[R Soul]

I'd like XPacker to include 'rF visibility' properties (and the equivalent for other supported games of course). I'm currently making some 60s themed billboards (using Old UK Advertising's textures) and would like the frames to always be visible, and the adverts to only be visible during a race weekend.

I've come across a number of problems with such large objects, and found that two things really help.
1: Complex Objects (XPacker only)
and
2: Visibility properties (BTB only, and they apply to the whole thing rather than specific components).

With both of those things in XPacker the problems would be solved.

 

[RichardHessels]

I'd like XPacker to include 'rF visibility' properties (and the equivalent for other supported games of course). I'm currently making some 60s themed billboards (using Old UK Advertising's textures) and would like the frames to always be visible, and the adverts to only be visible during a race weekend.

I've come across a number of problems with such large objects, and found that two things really help.
1: Complex Objects (XPacker only)
and
2: Visibility properties (BTB only, and they apply to the whole thing rather than specific components).

You can change the visibility of object or groups of objects already in BTB.
Object menu > Edit > rF visibility.
There is checkboxes there.. with all options.

 

[R Soul]

I know that, but one cannot change the visibility settings of components of complex objects.

 

[Brendon Pywell]

Thanks for the interest and ideas so far. It has reaffirmed that most of the things I have been working on will be worth it, even if not exactly as people might picture it.

 

[jay_p_666]

Thanks for the interest and ideas so far. It has reaffirmed that most of the things I have been working on will be worth it, even if not exactly as people might picture it.

Can't wait to see this!

 

[jay_p_666]

Thanks for the interest and ideas so far. It has reaffirmed that most of the things I have been working on will be worth it, even if not exactly as people might picture it.

Can't wait to see this!

 

[SmashingPants67]

Support for TOCA: Race Driver Series, GRID Series and NFS (Carbon>) Series!!

 

[RichardHessels]

Support for TOCA: Race Driver Series, GRID Series and NFS (Carbon>) Series!!

It's easier to produce the track and later convert it to other titles.
Tools like 3D simEd could do it.

 

[SmashingPants67]

Feature similar to Sketchup's "Add Terrain", but the images in DDS DXT1 1024x1024.

 

[R Soul]

It would be very nice if you could address this object rendering bug:

There's a thread here where it was revealed that it's caused by minimizing BTB.