Can't create a ghost car

[Mr. Jingles]

Hallo, my Name is Thomas (from germany) and I am new to this Forum. At first I want to say that I am
totally impressed of the game and possibillities! Thank you all to give us this for free!! Now I have the followig problem: I tried to make some ghost cars (Golf MK2 Diesel, MB 208 Pagode, Citroen GS), but in all 3 cases the cars appeared, but didn't become transparent. I've changed the shaders in the car.shd as descibed in the tutorial here. When I open the gost car via Raven and run it as a normal car in the game, the car is transparent as it should be. Any ideas? I run Racer 0.881 on Win XP SP2...

Thanks in advance and cheers!
Thomas

 

[boomer541]

I haven't used the ghost car but if it performs properly and isn't transparent I'd live with it as the ghost car for the Lambo is very hard to see and I would prefer it to be visible.

Anyway, Welcome to the Racer Community!

 

[citronized]

Hi Thomas (that's my newborn son's name ),

Welcome ! Is the default lambo ghost running on your system ? I guess it does…
Can you post one of the car.shd you've modified ? It'll be easier to see if this point is ok.

 

[Mr. Jingles]

Hi, Citronized,

thanks for your reply and help - the car.shd is in the attachment. Yes, the Lambo ghost is working correctly, but when I open the VW golf MK2 ghost (wich is the shd file in the attachment) directly via Raven or by removing the "_ghost" extension from the folder it appears transparent...when I use it as gost, it's not...

Congratulations to your son!
Cheers
Thomas

 

[Tiberius]

Hi. I've just tried creating a ghost car last night, seems it's VERY buggy and I'm getting the exact same issue as you - from what I can see of your shader, it looks fine.

I copied my car over, modified the shader etc, if I load it ingame it appears correctly as a ghost car, appears after 1st lap of my 'real' car and renders with the ghost shaders etc.

Seems that Racer has issues if the models are locked in an AR file, my ghost car worked fine but once I put the models in the AR it's glitched now, it still renders fine if I load it as my car ingame but when it appears as a ghost it's using the textures/shaders from the 'real' car, some of the generic models are messed up, wheels stuck in the ground etc. I'm also getting random crashes and black screens now, all I can put it down to is the ghost car :-/

 

[citronized]

Thank you for sharing, Bruce.
Ghost car was one bullet point on my GS todo list, I'll wait for a bug fix then

 

[Mr. Jingles]

Thanks, guys...I'll wait for this fix too.

Cheers
Thomas

 

[Tiberius]

Hmm, I checked it out tonight and it's definitely the models being locked into an AR which causes the problem. I looked at the Lambo on which the ghost car works, put the ghost Lambo's models into an AR...and it caused the same issue :-/

It's a no win situation really, for now :biggrin:

 

[Stereo]

Reminds me, you can shave a huge amount from the size of the ghost car by using relative paths in everything.

Take a look at this car.ini/views.ini/car.shd.
http://www.jonbuder.com/Stereo/Racer/lambomurcielago_ghost.rar

I run into problems trying to replace the .dofs this way (can't find some textures no matter what I do and the ghost shaders stop working right- transparency is lost), and skid.wav appears to be hardcoded, but you can delete all the .tgas and every other sound file. Reduces my lambomurcielago_ghost folder from 17.3MB to 427 KB with no Qlog errors (you get a couple errors if you remove skid.wav, but save some space). Maybe makes it more feasible to include ghost cars if you're not locking the .ars?