Builiding a New Track

[ScottWalker92]

Hi guys!

Basically I understand how Racer reads all the track information via track.shd, gemometry etc...

My question is what is the best way to get your track from 3DS Max to Racer? I really want to cut out TrackEd as it gives me constant errors....

I have 3DS Max 2011 to 2014 available to me?

Thanks in advance.

 

[William Geuze]

TrackEd, we use it every day without fault.

If you're getting errors, it might be worth looking into what is causing them instead of looking for an alternative?

 

[Mr Whippy]

Here we go again hehe.

There was a thread recently Scott which talked through a lot of the ways you have to manage your Max scene so the ASE looks the way TrackEd wants it to look so it will parse the scene properly and covert to DOF in a nice way.


The simple summation of trackEd is that it's nice for a full track export, very efficient, leaving very little to go wrong. You start from almost nothing and within about 30mins have a finished track ready to upload.

But it's not nice for an iterative build where you might want to build things, upgrade parts, test ideas etc as you work along.



You have to admit trackEd has some really bad features. Ie, deleting nested elements in geometry.ini, clearing out comments in all ini files etc.
It probably does some other odd things too that you might not even know it does until it's done them and lost you possibly hours of work unless you back up ever 30 mins hehe.


I say use all the tools available to work with their strengths... and the other tools available do have a lot of strong features worth appreciating and using

Dave

 

[ScottWalker92]

Yeah don't get me wrong when it imports the ASE files without causing a fatal error it is very useful. But no matter what I do say even if I export using the recommended settings and make sure everything it converted to editable poly, I 95% of the time get the fatal error.

Scott

 

[ammods]

how do you zoom or rotate the scene in tracked. i've got a track i've been working on,but wont let me rotate the view so i can see how it looks from another angle

 

[boomer541]

Rotate the monitor screen, LOL!
Seriously I haven't used tracked in a long time. You can use the mouse buttons to move around a bit but you can't rotate/tilt the image.

 

[Mr Whippy]

Pretty sure you can do full 3D nav in trackEd.

It's mouse button combos with shift or something. It'll say in the docs somewhere.

I'd load it to check but trackEd has a thing for deleting commented entries and un-nesting elements and stuff, which can wreak havoc with a WIP track... which all of mine are haha


I quite like trackEd UI for flying around, checking LOD's and all that stuff... but I don't do any editing in it if I can help it!

 

[ammods]

lol funny bugger. i got my track into game, but i have no racing lines or anything like that, i'm still trying to get an understanding on how this thing even works. maybe gonna take me a while lol.

 

[Alexander Knoll]

hmm...do i understand you right if i think you talk about the mini map? or do you talk about the ideal line (visible with F3)?
...anyway...for the minimap you needs to spline your track, for a ideal line you have to record a "good clean" lap with a car and if you use after this the F3 you can see it...

I use the tracked many times for more or less every thing if i most convert (i can't model.. :-( ) tracks for racer and i have no problems with it...

Alex

 

[Mr Whippy]

Since you're using 3DS Max, hopefully in the coming months I'll be able to release some maxscripts so you can go direct from Max to Racer... they'll need some videos to explain your way along though.

Ie, currently I generate a mesh in Max and use a script to make the spline file, so no need for trackEd there.

I'm even thinking of a way to do the racing/AI lines in Max, but not sure how I'd do it yet. I like the idea of having a spline over the mesh for the Racer spline object, and the height dictates the speed, and the top-down position determines the position on the spline.
That way you can at least tweak things visually and get a nice smooth response from the car.

Just a bit of fiddly coding to do that I think


Dave

 

[Mr Whippy]

Just to note, trackEd does work and is solid, but other approaches can work better.

It's just Ruud is a one man team and he can't spend all day making super fancy tools/scripts etc... again this is where the community can improve things.

Some1 made his great exporter for example. So it's also up to us to make things better for ourselves too.

After over a decade of making tracks for Racer, avoiding trackEd saves me time and hair from being pulled out, and lets me enjoy a much more WYSIWYG development approach... which is exactly what all the best tools are designed to do these days.

Dave

 

[ammods]

yep sounds great, you should be getting some kind of "encouragment"(maybe we need to throw you a few dollars to encourage you to make these scripts available to us lowly modders hahaha. to make these scripts, and yes i prefer 3dsmax myself, currently using 2012, but i'm sure i can "aquire" whatever version you will be making these scripts for. i used to make mods for world racing 2, but that game is just too old now, and racer is the next best thing imo, (i'm not a scratch maker either i just use converted 3d models..most if not all of my cars are permission granted, and for the one's i cant contact the author i leave a message in the readme.txt to get the author to contact me, if in the case his email is no longer active..)

 

[Mr Whippy]

The scripts will be free once they are good enough I think... and in theory they should work across most versions since Max 8 or 9 or so...

That is the nice thing about maxscript, it's user-maintainable rather than per-version compiled.

That is less flexible and a bit slower, but you can still do lots of handy time saving things via scripts.


Racer is pretty good really. Oodles of potential to be amazing. It's just so changeable. One thing works then next version it doesn't, then next version it does again.
Or features are half implemented and not finished.

Personally if I were making a commercial game I'd want something as flexible and good as Racer... it's great. But it'd have to be finished to a point and bug-fixed hehe.

But I'm increasingly tempted these days to get a framework going in Unity or UE or something... call it OpenRacer and have done.

Then at least all the code and systems are there for migrating, optimising, improving etc, and we hop on the back of a framework that already does all the nice network coding and graphics stuff for us!


Dave

 

[ammods]

i will be watching with great interest to see what you come up with...sent a msg to 'some1' today to see if we can get dof exporter updated to at least 2012 max 10 has too many graphical iasues with windows 8 64