Conversions from sims to rFactor

[Finno Zidjian]

I tried opening the MAS Tool you've linked, I unfortunatley cant open it, That instantly crashes aswell, So Im going to send you my RF work and the F1c original. 1964_BrandsHatch_Conversion_WIP

Hi, Gulag!

Man, I have good news for you; your conversion is perfect!! Congratulations on your work! I found the problem right off the bat and it wasn't your fault, just a bit of lack of experience... So it was important that I had the material here; There are many details and it was difficult for me to indicate a solution... it was like shooting in the dark; thanks for posting!

Well, the problem was in the omni of the SCN; delete all Light=Omni lines that are at the beginning of this file and the track will load. The OMNI settings of the F1C do not match the same as the RF.

Well, with the absence of night light, the ideal is that you enter the track during the day... In fact, in 1964 there weren't that many night races, so it's best to load the track in the same daytime hours... Configure this in the GDB or in the RF panel itself.

Well, the conversion is ready and now you can enhance it in your own way, right?! Good luck!

Hugs

 

[Gulag_Express]

Wow, Its as simple as that, well that's another important lesson learned for me and many thanks once again. Track loads no problem, all I need to do is a fix the cameras and clean up the files and the track is good.

 

[Finno Zidjian]

Wow, Its as simple as that, well that's another important lesson learned for me and many thanks once again. Track loads no problem, all I need to do is a fix the cameras and clean up the files and the track is good.
View attachment 687275

Yes, very good track, very well built!!

Man, as I'm taking a look at the work, I'm finding some things still to be done, of course... so one of them is about the AIW configuration, because the pacecar is out of position; there was no AUX coordinate setting. As I never remember which of the two positions is the pacecar and also never saw use in another coordinate I end up making the two coordinates equal; so copy and paste this just below the lines of the PITS so that your pacecar is no longer at the finish line and, yes, at the exit of the pitlane, okay?!

[AUX]

LocationIndex=0

Pos=(3,-2,-18)

Times=(-0.005,-8.120,0.007)

LocationIndex=1

Pos=(3,-2,-18)

Times=(-0.006,-8.120,0.006)



The GDB is also deserving of a more RF standard configuration; Take a look at this... I've even set up mine, but I think it's important that you do a comparison survey yourself with other RF track GDBs to gain more experience in your conversions; if you have any, there is no problem in asking.

Hugs

 

[Gulag_Express]

Thanks for that, I know at least one other track I have with that pace car issue.

 

[Finno Zidjian]

Thanks for that, I know at least one other track I have with that pace car issue.

Well, the problem with the pacecar is not difficult to solve in this your other track and the procedure serves for any track:

• You place these AUX lines below the PITS lines;
• With the track open in 3DSimed, try to locate where you want the pacecar to be;
• place the cursor on top of where you want to place the pacecar and note in the footer of the 3dsimed the coordinates X,Y,Z;
• then copy the X and Y coordinates; apply on your AIW.

Well, the Z is the depth, so look at the coordinates of the Z in the PITS settings and give the approximate configuration of these Z, because the pacecar is usually close to the cars, so the floor is about the same height. An important thing is to know that AIW coordinates work on X,Z,Y while 3dsimed works on X,Y,Z... so don't confuse the numbers to be applied. Another important thing is not to modify the coordinates of the second line, that is, the positioning is in the first line of each AUX.

 

[Gulag_Express]

Well, the problem with the pacecar is not difficult to solve in this your other track and the procedure serves for any track:

• You place these AUX lines below the PITS lines;
• With the track open in 3DSimed, try to locate where you want the pacecar to be;
• place the cursor on top of where you want to place the pacecar and note in the footer of the 3dsimed the coordinates X,Y,Z;
• then copy the X and Y coordinates; apply on your AIW.

Well, the Z is the depth, so look at the coordinates of the Z in the PITS settings and give the approximate configuration of these Z, because the pacecar is usually close to the cars, so the floor is about the same height. An important thing is to know that AIW coordinates work on X,Z,Y while 3dsimed works on X,Y,Z... so don't confuse the numbers to be applied. Another important thing is not to modify the coordinates of the second line, that is, the positioning is in the first line of each AUX.

Yeah I fixed it, the track also had an issue where pole position grid slot started in the pitlane, Fixed that aswell using the AIW Cam editor, very usefull program

 

[Gulag_Express]

Now in the process of converting Ain Diab 1958, conversion is successful but its very heavy on rfactor.
I notice when driving around trees the game struggles heavily and sometimes I crash into invisible walls in the middle of the track, It turns out all the trees are collidable (CollTarget=True).
So I'm now editing every instance of a tree in the SCN file with notepad thinking it would be faster thank clicking on and editing every single tree in 3Dsimed, and then I realize there are 17,000+ lines in the file.
Is there a better or quicker way of changing settings of objects? Maybe for example being able to edit multiple objects at once?

 

[Finno Zidjian]

Now in the process of converting Ain Diab 1958, conversion is successful but its very heavy on rfactor.
I notice when driving around trees the game struggles heavily and sometimes I crash into invisible walls in the middle of the track, It turns out all the trees are collidable (CollTarget=True).
So I'm now editing every instance of a tree in the SCN file with notepad thinking it would be faster thank clicking on and editing every single tree in 3Dsimed, and then I realize there are 17,000+ lines in the file.
Is there a better or quicker way of changing settings of objects? Maybe for example being able to edit multiple objects at once?

You see, invisible walls are probably not invisible walls and not trees... I say, probably, because once again I'm in the dark, shooting myself in the foot... But the probable cause of this is that you have to see the materials that have been applied to the asphalt; not always the nomenclature of the material used by the modeler is a standard name that is in the configuration of the TDF... So, you have to see the area in which this is happening and, through 3Dsimed, look for the name of the material applied to the object of the floor (serves for any floor... be it asphalt or external area, that is, if the problem with external area occurs, the procedure is the same). Having seen the name of the material then open the TDF and check if the name you found exists there... if not, edit to the list with the title "//Roads" (see below) which is where the configuration for the default asphalt is located. Put the name you found in 3dsimed: use comma after ROAD and don't need to give space, just write the name of the material you found.
As an example, let's assume you found the name "broads"... and when opening the TDF this name is not present... Then you edit:

// Roads
[FEEDBACK]
Dry=RoadDryGrip Wet=RoadWetGrip Resistance=0.0 BumpAmp=RoadBumpAmp BumpWavelen=RoadBumpLen Legal=true Spring=0.0 Damper=0.0 CollFrict=0.4 Sparks=1 Scraping=1 Sound=dry Reaction=tiresmoke Tex=smokewhite.tga Max=1024 Scale=(1.0,1.0,1.0) Growth=(4.0,3.0,2.0) ASDEnvelope=(2.0,0.2,3.5) DestBlend=InvSrcAlpha SrcBlend=SrcAlpha Reaction=skid Tex=skidhard.tga Max=2500 Pixel=NoReduceDetail Particle=Plane+Deformable+SingleSided DestBlend=InvSrcAlpha SrcBlend=SrcAlpha
//Reaction=wetskid Tex=skidwet.tga Max=1024 Duration=0.40 Pixel=NoReduceDetail Particle=Plane+Deformable+SingleSided DestBlend=InvSrcAlpha SrcBlend=SrcAlpha
//Reaction=spray Tex=rainspray.tga Max=1024 Scale=(0.3,0.05,0.6) Growth=(0.3,0.3,0.6) GrowthVel=(0.08,0.09,0.30) Power=0.41 RampSpeed=80.0 OffsetVel=0.10 ASDEnvelope=(0.05,0.07,0.90) DestBlend=InvSrcAlpha SrcBlend=SrcAlpha
Materials=road,broads


See if this works before you remove the collisions from the trees, as it is almost certain that they are not causing any problems, nor invisible walls...

Oh yes, by the way, I saw that you did the conversion of Brands without converting the BMP to DDS... this is even surprising, because the Rf does not accept BMP very well, and I was even surprised because the circuit is very light, but this is because the qualities of the textures are greatly reduced and so they are very light... but the ideal is to always convert the textures to DDS that are lighter even when you leave them in considerable sizes, 1024X1024, for example... We've already talked about this in the conversion of your cars... so probably the weight you're feeling on this other track is because maybe you haven't converted the BMP to DDS again or even haven't reduced the size of the BMP... Well... I convert everything to DDS because I have much more quality in the textures, but each one has its way of working and the end result is what matters, but if you need to make the track lighter you have these two options: either you convert to DDS or reduce the size of the BMP, right?!

As for modifying several command lines at once in SCN, there is, yes, but I prefer you to take a look at the Internet, try to put the name of the editor you use and next to the name put, find and replace... You can find precise instructions in your own language... I'm afraid of causing confusion in these crazy Google translations, okay!?

 

[Gulag_Express]

OK Ive converted all bmp textures to dds, The track loaded fast and was lighter but I hadn't removed the pink backgrounds from the textures. The image below somewhat confirms my suspicion about invisible walls in the track, The problem is the trees overhang onto the track and you can collide into them. I then removed all the pink from every texture using paint.net then loaded the track but I've noticed that the track has become more heavy again, in some places its more heavy than it was when I had bmp textures.
I also modified the TDF file however the track didn't have one so I've copied one from another track then added in the material names for the roads, gravel, grass and walls. The track is still heavy unfortunately.

 

[Finno Zidjian]

OK Ive converted all bmp textures to dds, The track loaded fast and was lighter but I hadn't removed the pink backgrounds from the textures. The image below somewhat confirms my suspicion about invisible walls in the track, The problem is the trees overhang onto the track and you can collide into them. I then removed all the pink from every texture using paint.net then loaded the track but I've noticed that the track has become more heavy again, in some places its more heavy than it was when I had bmp textures.
I also modified the TDF file however the track didn't have one so I've copied one from another track then added in the material names for the roads, gravel, grass and walls. The track is still heavy unfortunately.
View attachment 687587

Hi, Gulag!

Yes, you were right on the issue of trees colliding, but as you said "in the middle" of the track, I thought trees wouldn't be the problem; details of the words that either help or get in the way...

Anyway, strange is at first, after the BMB/DDS conversion, to have become lighter and, after the removal of the pink, to have become heavy again... By the way, it's weird that there's weight... the circuits converted from F1C to RF have the habit of being much more agile in the RF, but I do not know the size of it and I do not know what more objects there are in the circuit besides the trees... If you want me to do a review on the track, feel free to send it to me, okay?! Whatever I can and know how to help , I am available.

Hugs

 

[Gulag_Express]

Hi, Gulag!

Yes, you were right on the issue of trees colliding, but as you said "in the middle" of the track, I thought trees wouldn't be the problem; details of the words that either help or get in the way...

Anyway, strange is at first, after the BMB/DDS conversion, to have become lighter and, after the removal of the pink, to have become heavy again... By the way, it's weird that there's weight... the circuits converted from F1C to RF have the habit of being much more agile in the RF, but I do not know the size of it and I do not know what more objects there are in the circuit besides the trees... If you want me to do a review on the track, feel free to send it to me, okay?! Whatever I can and know how to help , I am available.

Hugs

Yes my apologies, I should have worded it better.
As for the textures there are about 657 textures, the largest one are 1024x1024 or 2048x512.
For objects there are 2,200 gmt objects.

I don't want to make you do work but here is the track, If your looking for the original F1c track I don't have it and I cant remember where I got it from
1958_AinDiab_WIP

 

[Gulag_Express]

Thanks to the help from people on SuperUser, I now have a way to edit the CollTargets of multiple objects at once using notepad++

".*" is a wildcard, so accepts anything between brosm and .gmt
Everything in the brackets is saved into \1
So for replace is everything upto CollTarget= and then True is replaced with False

I used this to turn of collision on all trees, flag men and brake marker boards wich fixes the issues i had with trees overhanging onto the track, unfortunately the track was still heavy. I went and turned down the track graphics to lowest I can, It runs better but looks ugly, I still notice when driving around where there are lots of trees the frame rate drops significantly. Im going to try compress the tree textures to see if it helps.

 

[Finno Zidjian]

Thanks to the help from people on SuperUser, I now have a way to edit the CollTargets of multiple objects at once using notepad++

".*" is a wildcard, so accepts anything between brosm and .gmt
Everything in the brackets is saved into \1
So for replace is everything upto CollTarget= and then True is replaced with False
View attachment 687754
I used this to turn of collision on all trees, flag men and brake marker boards wich fixes the issues i had with trees overhanging onto the track, unfortunately the track was still heavy. I went and turned down the track graphics to lowest I can, It runs better but looks ugly, I still notice when driving around where there are lots of trees the frame rate drops significantly. Im going to try compress the tree textures to see if it helps.

Hi, Gulag!

Glad you were able to find a tutorial on changing names in Notepad; There are things we know how to do, but it's hard to explain and, since I know there are tutorials about it on the internet, I thought it best that you do the research yourself. It is no longer the case of conversion, where there are even many tutorials and the thing is much more comprehensive; Several details are left out in these tutorials, so I still focus more on this subject to try to help those who are starting out in the task.

Well, until I managed to get to the solution of the problem of lags (extremes!) in some curves, I made some modifications to the GDB and SCN files in order to try to solve the problem, but basically, even with several changes in these files, I only ended up concluding that the same problem was trees that have very heavy textures ... I chose to remove from the SCN all the trees called "palme" (only with the removal of these, the lags practically disappeared) and "fores" (eliminating any lag once and for all); However, if you find the presence of these trees essential, try to reduce the weights of the corresponding textures to a value that pleases you... it may be that reducing half of the 1Mb they carry at the moment can solve ... If it doesn't solve it, reduce it again until you feel satisfied. I was happy to put "woods" below...

I'm sending you the clue as I worked because I made some changes that I thought necessary and I have no way to describe one by one, but, I ask that you try to look closely at the clue and make the comparisons of how it was then and how it is now... you can, by yourself, observe what was done on the track, through SCN, mainly, but also in GDB (it is important to know that TDF has its command line configured in this file) and in CAM (which deserves a better treatment of some cameras; in certain stretches it seems that the camera was not configured for this circuit and you can try to edit this better in the Guitamaen 422 Editor that you already know; note the LODMultiplayer values, now with more graphic quality).

Yes, the changes I made that had no relation to the lag problem, were more in the realm of personal taste: I put shadows all over the asphalt and on the sides of the track (but not in the most distant areas), through the object road_shadow which I assembled and am sending you in the open folder; I applied ShadowCaster (config. SCN) on objects (bridges and garages) that were supposed to cast shadows over cars and were not configured to do so; I changed the whole sky, because the textures of the original sky had graphic assembly flaws (I'm also sending this file (MAS) and it's already in the SCN configuration); I removed the pitlightin and out, as well as the startlight, because they are mounted with figures and were not functional ... I thought they might be causing the problems initially and ended up not returning them, because they were not even functional and I did not want to break my head to solve this but to solve the problem of lags ... Still on this group of objects, right at the SCN entry, they are configured for F1C (stlit, ptlit01 and ptlit02 are commands of this game), you should always replace these commands with startlight, pitlightout and pitlgihtin corresponding to the previous ones and that are command for the RF...

Anyway, the track is functional and you can run on it or use it only for your study compared to the original work you put together and improve yours in your own way, okay?!

I just want to point out that I modified the names of all the files, because I do not like dates involved in my game, I always prefer to look for my clues by their name and the dates end up confusing me; if you want to take advantage of my clue and not go back to yours and have an interest in the date, you know how to do it; right?!

Finally, I want to say once again that I don't feel bothered at all about you coming to me to seek some solution. I have already said and I repeat, I like to help when I can help! If I know how to help, I will always try to help; If I don't know I'll try to learn because I always gain something more from these challenges and just for the record: this was a good challenge for me! Just to give you an idea, I don't like circuits like this, too long, too straight... and if I had no challenges to face, I would never race on this circuit, but the challenge of trying to solve the problems that had made me even like it; I won, didn't I?! Thank you for entrusting me with this work too!

75.69 MB file on MEGA

mega.nz

Hugs

 

[Gulag_Express]

Wow Thanks very much, there are not many people in the world like you.
Ive tried it and yes I see the visual changes you've made and the track is allot more playable, still lag spikes around trees but massively better. Ive tried compressing all the textures by first converting them to png via 3dsimed then using https://batchcompress.com/en to compress them.

The new size looks promising, I convert the pngs back to dds via 3dsimed and size of each texture ends up being bigger than what it originally was for exampe texture EUCA01 was 1025kb but now 1366kb however the visual quality is lower, put them in a new mas file and ran the track, frame rate is good, I'm averaging round 50fps but there's one slight problem

I have to now remove the white background from every single texture using dds. Very fun.

EDIT: Re did the whole compression this time converted back to bmp because the websites accepts bmp plus its easier to remove pink background, then convert back to dds and remove backgrounds, pack into mas and now fps is a disaster again, yep you are right those trees need to go.

 

[philrob]

Gulag,
the now white background is because you have removed the Alpha channel, this allows the trees to be cut out from the texture. You have removed the transparent part of the texture.

 

[Gulag_Express]

Gulag,
the now white background is because you have removed the Alpha channel, this allows the trees to be cut out from the texture. You have removed the transparent part of the texture.

so there is a way of the alpha channel becoming transparent in dds without manually removing the background using paint.net?

 

[philrob]

Gulag,
yes the alpha channel has to be there, deleting it will only allow the colour that surrounds the tree to show in game( like your white background). so replace the alpha channels and set the trees to transparent in simed.

 

[philrob]

Gulag,
i downloaded the track posted above by Finno, this has no Alpha problems with Trees,Spectators,Skyboxi, grass.
I suggest you download that version but dont touch any of the textures that have Alphas.
I have never used paint.net so not quite sure what it shows, i create my Alphas in Photoshop.

 

[Gulag_Express]

Gulag,
yes the alpha channel has to be there, deleting it will only allow the colour that surrounds the tree to show in game( like your white background). so replace the alpha channels and set the trees to transparent in simed.

Ok so I've taken original textures, convert from bmp to dds but keeping the pink background.

I set that one tree to transparent as a test, updated the scn via 3dsimed, and left both options unchecked when prompted. Load track up and the same has still got pink background. Am I missing something?

EDIT: Opened up the scn file with simed and noticed the tree transparency option is set back to "By Material"

 

[Gulag_Express]

Ive given up with the whole idea compressed textures and just want to move on to somthing else so I took the easy way out and used the files Finno has given me, only difference is ive removed all trees and shrubs from the scn and Ive kept the flag men even though they dont work. So once again many thanks Finno, This track was a headache.

All that's left now is to do the cameras.