Jaguar X-Type Version 2.0

[Tiberius]

I've spent so much time on this car on and off over the past 2 years, I could almost write a book about it. For the quality of the model, you might wonder how the hell I spent that amount of time on it :smile:

The story goes, after I released the beta back in mid 2008 I did some work on it from time to time, improved parts and started making new textures. That went on for a while until I changed computers and magically managed to lose everything except the actual models. A few weeks back I got an email from someone asking to convert it to another game, decided to patch it up and release a minor update for Racer. And here we are, it's far from perfect but a lot more finished than it was before.

It definitely isn't my finest piece of modelling, I've got a great deal better since I originally modelled most of the car, I have to accept that it's never going to be up to the standard of the Capri or the XJ-S unless I delete everything and start over. The most recent parts I've made are the steering wheel (never made a backup of the original steering wheel model so had to make a new one) and also the tyre textures, compare those to the ones from the first version and you'll see the difference in quality.

There's a few small texturing bugs due to the way I originally mapped the models, seems the bump mapping makes faults far more noticeable (I never gave a thought to mapping the car well enough for anything like bump mapping). Forgive the bugs and just enjoy the car.

If you need any more info, there's a loooong readme which covers most things - credits are in there too.

You'll need a recent version of Racer to use this, it won't work on ancient Racer versions - sorry :frown:. PLEASE don't moan because it's CG only, Everything is complicated enough already, what with different sets of shaders and new bits in the car.ini, doing a backward compatible version without all that would just be another headache with stuff like textures probably needing to be changed to look better on the old shaders. You're more than welcome to do a non-cg version compatible for older Racer versions if you like.

If anyone can tweak the physics with some better data (Dave, would you be interested?), it would be welcome. I've gone as far as I can, I spent ages tweaking the physics, any real data that I could find is in the car.ini (a lot more than before). I've made a lot of comments in the ini about where data came from etc, some data I just couldn't find anywhere though. If you want to cruise in the car it's fine, but I spent most of the time driving it to within an inch of its life on the Ring and Spa, I really wanted something which used all of Racer's new features and drove well.

I'll try and upload a colourpack of sorts in a few days, I need to sort the textures and tweak the shaders for some of the colours, having issues getting the interior colours to work well. For now it's Carnival Red with Tan/Mocha interior, burr walnut veneer. There was also going to be a ghost car variant but I hit some major bugs (see the thread in the main forum).

If you download, PLEASE comment - either positive or negative, I don't mind - but some feedback would really help.

That's all to say, get the car on my Filefront here: http://www.filefront.com/15545437/jaguar_x-type_v2.rar


Happy driving :smile:




(If thumbnails don't open, delete 'th_' part of URL)

 

[Knut Omdal Tveito]

Looks great from the pics but I got an error when I choose the car:
DGPUShaderManager:MakeObject(dyn_standard_reflect_chrome_f.cg): can't create CG fragment shader program CG error : "The file could not be read."

 

[Harey]

Yeah after upgrading to the newest version (v0.8.8) (finally been too lazy to do so otherwise) and fixing the small shader error you made, great car, you say its not that great, but I say different, brilliant looking car, even better on the move. If you'd like Tiberius I can post the fixed car.shd (it was such a small fix, you could probably very easily do it). for everyone else.

 

[Tiberius]

Looks great from the pics but I got an error when I choose the car:
DGPUShaderManager:MakeObject(dyn_standard_reflect_chrome_f.cg): can't create CG fragment shader program CG error : \\\\\"The file could not be read.\\\\\"

Oh no, the Cg shader demon strikes again. Sorry about that, I checked it a dozen times and still left one out :frown:

EDIT: Update patch removed, download in the first post is fixed.

 

[citronized]

Can't test it right now, but I will as soon as possible! From the posted pics, it looks great, as usual I love the way it looks, I'll read your shd file with lot of interest.

Are you still playing with specular only for the metallic paint shaders or you've found new tricks?

 

[Harey]

I'd say he's got metallics down pretty good from the looks of it lol, and it does finally work properly I think Tiberius, hard not to take 50 million screenies of it lol

 

[Tiberius]

Alright guys, I *hope* the version in the download in the first post is working now, at least I just deleted any custom shaders at this end and it works for me.

About the metallics, it's basically the shader I posted on RSC last year, the one on the Fury in this shot:

It's still plain old specular I'm afraid, but that's all metallic flecks are, right? Just metalized flecks in the paint's basecoat which settle at random angles when the paint is sprayed on and reflect the sun at different angles, then covered by the clearcoat to give them some protection. It's just really, really hard to get anything to look good like that,, I think it's pretty much the best we can do with the lighting model in Racer at the moment (and that's not Racer's fault, the lighting has gotta be simple enough to be able to render stuff in realtime). The thing I really don't like are the actual sun reflections, they look better now the reflections are in HDR but they still bother me. Look at sun reflections on a polished car IRL and the sun reflections are sharp, in Racer they're still quite hazy like you're reflecting the sun in polished plastic. Camsinny mentioned trying to get some different lighting models working on RSC a while back (phong lighting maybe?), but if he managed to get it to work I've got no idea.

And then you get to black car paint, that's another can of worms..

Plastics/leathers look fine, but materials like paint and brushed/anodized metal really could do with a different lighting model I think :smile:

Like I said, any feedback is welcome, if you think something looks bad and think you might have a better way, feel free to suggest something :smile:

 

[Alexander Knoll]

THX Bruce, this Jaaaag looks awersome!

 

[KS95]

Man I'm drooling, that is brilliant work Tib. I can't wait to drive it, which I should be able to do next week (at the other home! *yay*) although I do have one minor criticism. I hope I'm not being overcritical but the door textures really annoy me lol. Other than that it looks.. well.. amazing. So nice to see cars showing off Racer's potential.

 

[Tiberius]

KS: What do you mean, the interior door textures or the door handles on the body texture? I gotta agree with you, I'm not happy with some of the interior textures at all, they would've needed to go if I'd done anything more with the car. Problem is getting good reference shots to use as textures, eBay usually has a gazillion of these for sale or breaking for parts, but there's just very little chance of finding photos good enough to use for textures. Photos taken by one eyed, one legged drunk people, photos taken with mobile phones, photos of mirrors and toasters which contain reflectoporn in one corner, that's eBay for ya :biggrin:.

Most of the interior textures came from brochures, some really nicely scanned but when you're trying to cut a tiny part of a scanned image and use it again, it's really difficult to get it to look decent.

The ideal really is to get access to a car with a camera, at least when I did the Scorpio I had a couple hundred photos taken with my old digicam. Even those were difficult to make look reasonable as textures, what with lighting etc. The camera I've got now would do a lot better, even a bad image still looks great in comparison with what the old one took, I'm also a lot better now at Paint Shop. But you've still got to find the right model of car with someone willing to let you take photos of it, and then you really need to have the car in a place where there's decent light..

So yeah, I agree with you totally, but it's just really difficult to get access to high quality photos, believe me if I'd had them I would use them :frown:

 

[Knut Omdal Tveito]

It worked now


Superb quality! What I like most is the body panels and the steering wheel (the Jaaaaaaag emblem looks great).

I didn't know I could have several dof-models like model0, model1, model2 .... I thought I had to pack everything into one body.dof

Seems like a top notch RACER-car. I will have a close look at your car, I see there is lots to learn.

Thanks for sharing it Tiberius

 

[KS95]

Yeah, the interior door panels. That seems to be the only main problem.

 

[2o6]

I can't get Cg working. I don't understand, I can get some Cg working, but others I can't.

 

[Tiberius]

I can't get Cg working. I don't understand, I can get some Cg working, but others I can't.

Look man, I'm not god - if you post your Qlog here I might know what's going on, otherwise I can't tell you.

If you're running an ATI card you might have trouble with the mipmap bias on the body shader, if you're running an older card you might have issues with the amount of functions in some of the shaders.

Post the Qlog and I'll try and help.

 

[FiftyOrange]

Carlsberg don't make 3D Jags for Racer, but if they did,
they probably wouldn't be as good as this one.

 

[Cosmo°]

Thanks for that update Tiberius, it makes for a great "new generation" Racer release with a lot of the more or less recently added features included. After a couple of drives and some comparison runs against the old version, a few things occured to me.

- The leaper seems to be slightly misplaced.
- The door handle texture has been mentioned already, it indeed stands out in the driving view. Perhaps this would benefit from being a 3D detail.
- The wheel texture feels a bit flat, lug nuts in 3D would be nice and a valve stem wouldn't be out of place at all.
- Like on the old version the sunroof texture is missing one dot somewhere in the middle.
- The bump mapping on some parts such as the pillars, calipers and wipers seems overdone or more like texture noise maybe.
- During driving in the default camera, the head of the driver model can be seen.
- There's only one colour option, a few official choices inside and out would be fantastic.
- No indicators or reverse lights are present.
- There's no unique horn sound.

I do like the graphics in general though, as you've set the "new" shaders up pretty well with distinctive settings for the various materials. That's great for the immersion. Also noteworthy is the lit up HUD and real world relevant interior accessories. Apart from the above nitpicks, I'd mostly like to see some more options - exterior and interior colours, the green tinted windscreen top could be optional, the gearbox choices could be pre-done in separate car.ini files and so on. Thanks for including a proper readme.

On the technical side, I feel the car is quite stiff and numb. Furthermore, it also behaves fairly neutral, with a hint of lift off oversteer instead of moderate understeer as expected and observed from test and review video footage. In comparisons with the German alternatives, it always came out more comfortable, but less precise and rewarding even with the sports suspension package. Despite the vastly softer springing in this release compared to v1, it doesn't seem to move around as much and thus also doesn't communicate as well with the driver. I would say that this has more to do with the damping rather than the spring settings.

The steering in my opinion is too heavy on Porsche/G25/G27 style wheels, where I run about 50% of what you set as the default. I remember switching from a DFP to the G25 and needing to adjust my habits in this regard, because the DFP/Momo style wheels are just not as strong. On a related note, while lowering the ff_factor helps with this, there's still a rough spot around the centre of the steering which unsettles things as you go from one direction to the other. This likely comes from the Mz curve rising a little too sudden towards it's peak force.
In the car.ini you suggest linearity for 900° wheels to be >1.0, but since the formula goes controller lock divided by real car lock, ie 900/936, it should be linearity=0.96.

There are some default/car.ini dependencies where your car.ini doesn't list some parameters, you can enable note_ini_fallback in the racer.ini dbg section to see them in your qlog.

Overall, v2 is more realistic and much more fun than v1, in particular the inertia, grip and basic balance have all improved. With a more compliant setup, slightly more body roll, less aggressive low speed damping and a smoother steering feedback, it can be an excellent ride.

 

[Tiberius]

Hi Cosmo. I'll try and answer everything, apologies if this gets long:

- The leaper seems to be slightly misplaced.

Hmm, I didn't notice that, it's sunken into the bonnet too much. I changed the front end after exporting the model, I must have forgot to move it up.

- The wheel texture feels a bit flat, lug nuts in 3D would be nice and a valve stem wouldn't be out of place at all.

I thought about that, but I had to stop somewhere - if it had been a design with exposed nuts, I would've modeled them. The wheel model/texture is the one from before, all I did was put a new tyre model/texture on, improved the blur textures. Ideally I would have put a new wheel texture on, that was a photo from one of the sales packs and is far more heavily shaded, but in a way I do like the look of it vs. the texture I did with more realistic shading. It's a bit of artistic license if you like.

- Like on the old version the sunroof texture is missing one dot somewhere in the middle.

Hehe, I left that dot out just for you :smile:

- The bump mapping on some parts such as the pillars, calipers and wipers seems overdone or more like texture noise maybe.

Yep, that was something which I changed at the last moment, the source texture was a random noise texture with some Gaussian blur. I ran into issues with the normal map filter interpreting that as texture noise, I'll have another try at a better texture. I'm not in love with the caliper models/texture, I may actually change those if I do decide to update it again.

- During driving in the default camera, the head of the driver model can be seen.

I noticed that - I would have removed the driver for the interior view but you can't do that with the pilot model can you? Again, I put the pilot model in just because Racer supported it and I wanted to use everything that I could, really I would've prefered adding the driver as part of the interior model set, being able to cut it from interior views etc.

- No indicators or reverse lights are present.

Indicators don't work yet though, do they? I made indicator models for the Capri but couldn't find any mention of them on racer.nl except for making HUD icons. I thought about reverse lights but I honestly couldn't remember whereabouts in the lamp cluster they should be, again time/patience ran out for me, it was one thing I intended to add/improve but never got around to.

On the technical side, I feel the car is quite stiff and numb..

Damper settings? Yes, it behaves totally different with the old style dampers - if you have a better set of damper curves, feel free to let me have a copy. I searched the part numbers for the original dampers and aftermarkets, just so I might be able to get an idea such as front/rear ratio. All I could find were some references to 0.3/0.7 bump/rebound damper setups, which is what I ended up with. It just seemed to dive too much on corners with pure linear dampers, hence giving them a bit of a curve on the rebound.

About the handling overall, I suppose it's all subjective and down to personal opinion - I drove it over a period of a couple of weeks and gradually adjusted the sounds/physics, I did really like the way it drove in the end and it didn't strike me as numb - perhaps very slightly stiff and slightly oversteer biased, but certainly not outside the bounds of reality. Maybe if I leave it alone for a few weeks and go back I might think I should have set parts up differently.

The steering in my opinion is too heavy on Porsche/G25/G27 style wheels, where I run about 50% of what you set as the default. I remember switching from a DFP to the G25 and needing to adjust my habits in this regard

Yes, I set the handling up on a G25. If you look under the ff_factor I made a comment that it should be lower in reality. However, cars just seem to numb to me with light FFB, I suppose because being on a computer versus in a real car, so many parts of the overall experience is missing. In that regard I do like a bit more feedback, also that's why I have most of the cameras set to 70-80 degrees - I know technically it isn't right but I miss the feeling of speed otherwise.

There are some default/car.ini dependencies where your car.ini doesn't list some parameters, you can enable note_ini_fallback in the racer.ini dbg section to see them in your qlog.

All it fired at me were ackerman/reverse steering settings for rear wheels, model X/Y/Z, things like angle for the new style cameras (I took the angle sections out because they're redundant for the new cameras, aren't they?). Also, kingpin, that has never been included, has it? The one that stumps me is that it's asking for bumpstop damper rates, I'm sure I never noticed those mentioned on racer.nl.

Overall, I know there's some bugs, if I had kept it until it was 99% perfect it would have just been lost again and never released. As you probably realise it takes half the time spent getting a project to 90% then it takes at least as long again to iron out the last 10% of the bugs, inaccuracies etc. Besides, I'm not a robot, just a guy who sits in front of his computer for a couple of hours of an evening while everyone else watches TV downstairs.

But I appreciate the feedback, nice to know someone is on the ball :smile:

 

[Cosmo°]

I knew you would like to hear about the dot again and I appreciate it changing position to keep things interesting on top :wink:

The driver model itself isn't so much the cause, as is the positioning and range of the camera I would say. Nothing a Racer user can't fix on his/her own, of course.

Indicators are views.ini items only so far, yes. I'm not holding that against your release in any way, but I think it's obvious that you're the type of person who enjoys details like these, that's why I mentioned them - they seem to be ignored a lot unfortunately.

You're right in that the car is not outside the of bounds of reality, I didn't mean to imply that. Accelerations in all directions seem to be fine and it responds logically to inputs. It's just that from looking at video footage, slalom, country roads and such, the body seemed to move around more than it comes across in Racer. The revised tyres are pretty clear in their feedback and tell you enough about where you are on the grip range, but there's a certain lack of information coming through the suspension that made me call it numb.

Scrolling through the car.ini again, camber_change_steering is side sensitive btw, so it needs to be negative on one side of the car.

Some of the missing parameters qlog lists are the kind you might want to make sure are defined per car, such as the inboard brake setting and gear inertias (there's a typo on gears 4 and 5). As far as I know kingpin hasn't been enabled yet. Bump and rebound stop dampers were something we asked Ruud to include a while ago, he might not have listed it in the documentation though. It works similar to the old, linear dampers, so you define them as normalized N/m/s. Due to the natural damping properties of commonly used rubber materials in this area, a separate element was required, as they were previously only damped through the "main" dampers in each corner.
You can also utilize a vertical tire_damping parameter now, to be placed in the wheel section.

What's a TV anyway? :wink:

 

[Tiberius]

Hi Cosmo. I'll work on those things when I get time, there's also a few other small bugs I noticed (maybe which you noticed too but didn't mention )

About bumpstops, they're usually just chunks of rubber on road cars, aren't they? I used the K figures which Ruud mentioned over on RSC, I never saw anything about bump/rebound dampers though. What amount of damping am I looking for here - quite high being solid rubber?

About the camber/toe per meter / camber change steering, those are probably very wrong, I have real problems trying to work out how on earth my 'average' suspension would move a meter, or how I could get that figure from a realistic amount of suspension movement (say measuring the camber change from 10cm of movement, do I just multiply that by 10 to get the camber per meter?). I understand how wheel camber changes as the suspension moves up and down but I was getting some weird effects in Racer - camber change per meter = 1.0 gives me something like 20 degrees of camber when the car is sitting on the line at Carlswood..

Toe change per meter is down to the steering linkage isn't it? I can't work out how the wheels could increase/decrease toe without being pulled sideways by the steering linkage as they move relative to it, or is there another factor here I don't understand?

You're right, it could do with being a bit softer.

Hmmm.. :smile:

 

[Cosmo°]

I didn't go through the car.ini with a fine comb to be honest, but there are some things like the outdated differential and spring length definitions, as well as minor things like missing semicolons and the odd value that seemed suspicious (toe for example seems too high to be a per side setting, more like per axle).

Bump and rebound stop damping was mentioned in the changelog for v0.8.5, but it's unfortunately missing from the documentation pages, as you say. Ruud suggests a starting value there as well.

I wouldn't call them simple chunks of rubber, as they're integral parts of the suspension design and not just a crude safety net. They are used as supplementary spring devices on road and race cars, sometimes replacing conventional springs entirely. A popular example would be to have them compensate for payloads, adding stiffness with relatively little bump deflection already. Due to the highly non-linear nature of their engagement and typically high peak stiffnesses, proper matching is critical to the handling and safety of the vehicle. You can find some "inspiration" on the range of dimensions and stiffnesses here, for example.

Rebound stops should probably be kept significantly shorter than the bump side equivalents and I would also try to keep their influence as small as possible - you don't want to add unnecessarily high forces into the system. They were originally added because we encountered problems when the defined maxlen was not adhered to by Racer and wheels kept extending endlessly after the introduction of the revised spring (curve) features.

As for the inherent damping properties of those stops, there's a lot less information available openly and the sheer variety of possible materials and designs means apart from some guidelines, it's all about trial and error for us (unless you find somebody from the industry willing to share some knowledge). Some time ago I came across these (very rough) numbers from a commercial source, where the damping coefficient for natural rubber was given as ~0.1 and typical industrial urethane as used in relevant applications at ~0.5.



The wheel kinematics we can define in Racer at the moment are always going to be a big compromise because they assume a unidirectional, linear change of alignment per given deflection. If you search the net for camber curves, toe change graphs and similar keywords, you should be able to get an idea of the ranges involved - some suspension designs will add perhaps 5° of camber from end to end deflection, others might go through an S-shape and average out at zero change. You need to make a decision there, about what is more important for the relevant driving conditions you expect the model to see.

As such, coming from this part of the picture to the normalized units used in Racer can give you the kind of seemingly awkward numbers you mentioned, but the method you came up with is correct. If you expect a toe change of 1° over a deflection range of 0.3m, then you'll have to take 1/0.3 =~3.33°/m (though keep an eye out for which of the parameters uses degrees and which use radians). camber_change_steering, kingpin_offset (NYI) and toe_change_per_m are side sensitive.

Keep in mind that these alignment changes are applied at the restlen of your suspension, which means that you need to set them before you adjust the actual camber and toe settings in the wheel sections. In other words, if your desired camber change gives you 20° of negative camber at ride height but you only want 1°, compensate the difference via the camber setting.

You're right, the steering linkage is responsible for the toe changes during wheel deflection, due to the offset it has to the steering axis of the wheel and also the track width changes that occur. It's probably much easier to get one's head around all the alignment changes with an animated model - you can either create a simplified version in your 3D application or check out some of the available software, such as this one.