Content update turtorial?

[ZATRACERDUDE]

i spend massive amounts of time in front of my computer and have a half way decent rig anyone have any suggestions or the time to write a proper one for updating old content to modern racer standards and i dont mean like totally rewriting ini's i mean like updating shaders and small physics updates that are needed that someone like me can use to bring more content up to par with new racer

 

[boomer541]

It is a tedious and time consuming task to update older content cars or tracks. The first requirement is to get permission from the creator. Then proceed with the update by fixing any Qlog errors. Then look at the racer pages for guidence and new content that works the way it should on the latest Racer version and go from there. It take a lot of searching for the info but the result is rewarding.

 

[Alex Forbin]

It's still a bit premature to start updating shaders since we are still trying to get a base to work from in regards to Cg lighting.
Once we get some sort of agreed consensus it should be pretty straightforward.

Car ini files on the other hand are easy to update and things are much less nebulous there.

Alex Forbin

 

[ZATRACERDUDE]

thanks guys for the tips i just wanna contribute to the community however i can

 

[DavidI]

I'd say get a large stockpile of coffee, A large glass jar and about $200 in small change to feed the 'swear jar'

 

[ZATRACERDUDE]

hahaha that could work well too or a blow up hammer u can smack people with when they start swearing

 

[Some1]

It's still a bit premature to start updating shaders since we are still trying to get a base to work from in regards to Cg lighting.
Once we get some sort of agreed consensus it should be pretty straightforward.

Car ini files on the other hand are easy to update and things are much less nebulous there.

Alex Forbin

I'd say, wait for the next Racer final and then start updating old content and creating new content!

 

[Stereo]

Updating is kinda tricky, cause you need to learn 2 things - 1st, the old content system - 2nd, the new content system. If you're making something from scratch you can skip the 1st part, but if you're trying to update old content you need to understand how it works so it's possible to translate it. And some old techniques (like emissive throughout track materials) should be scrapped and done differently, so you need to learn about that too.

You can learn a lot just by comparing the Murcielago from (say) 0.6.5 and 0.8.20. The material names are probably 95% the same, maybe 100%, and they mostly work correctly now. For earlier 0.8.x versions I wouldn't recommend using the Murci to learn from cause it's not all Cg and has some oddities (the wheels reflect their own texture for example)

Once you've seen the general equivalences (what's a shiny body texture, what's used on tires, etc.) you can translate that to other cars fairly easily. Car and track shaders are far easier to write with cg, which is a plus to the new system, but you need to know which ones to use and set them up correctly to start with.

The new system enforces a lot of uniformity that the old one didn't, though - there's no more blendfunc=one_minus_src_alpha to compensate for inverted alpha channels when mixing layers. So you may have to go to the textures and edit them to make sense (100% = opaque, 0% = transparent) This applies to the Murcielago's window texture for example, which is inverted only in some parts for some reason.


In my opinion it's never too early to start learning the cg system. The more comfortable you are with it, the better you can make suggestions so Ruud can tweak it to work for the content creators and give the best possible experience in the next final version. Of course, don't expect any content you work on now to stay perfect - but it'll be easier to update if it's already got cg shaders. I've been keeping a couple of my cars (Aronde and RX-7) up to date with every new cg enabled version, and most of the time it's just a matter of reading over the version notes and implementing whatever changes were made. If you understand the Cg system doing these things is fairly easy.



I expect when the final is out, some guides will be made on setting up the basic shaders (matte, paint gloss, glass, etc.) so that anyone can just copy/paste them, insert their own texture+material name, and be done.

 

[DavidI]

The reason we are saying wait until 090 final is that when u get something working in the current release, next release the track and/or cars may be black or white, shadows wrong, or u end up with ur animated trees that used to work turning into giants and bashing u around the track (true story) etc. This may require a little or a lot to sort out, and Murphys Law says that as soon as u sort it out Ruud will invariably release a new version that stuffs it again completely, or reverts the changes u spent ages changing. By all means try to learn the Cg stuff and how to convert and more prefferably model your own content, but its not a great time to actually do it unless your prepared to spend vast amounts of time redoing things every Racer release.