No click and Drag? No Material change? - Win 7 64

Hi all,

I installed the Demo to try and see if BTB works on my rig with Win7 64bit before eventually purchase a licence.
As of now I have noticed the following "Problems" and was wondering if someone could help me out:

1. In any view, I can not select or "Click and Drag" multiple terrain anchors. If I draw a vague shape around the anchors to select them, either nothing happens or only some are selected. This makes it impossible for me to edit Terrain properly as it would take ages to do it anchor-by-anchor.

2. I can change the material of the terrain but I am unable to do it with the road or the walls, something like "there must be at least one surface"-message pops up. Also, I don't see any other option for road or wall material. Is this due to the Demo?

3. In 3-D View the mouse commands are extremely slow, it takes forever to zoom in or out or move along the track with the middle-button. It's much faster in top- or side-view.

Program starts and runs fine. (did not try to run it in XP-compatibility mode though).

Any kind of help is appreciated! Am I doing something wrong? Are there commands that I did not see?

Thank you very much! :)
 
Hey I'm sort of in the same boat as you here, I haven't been able to find many beginner tutorials for BTB. At least it all seems a little over my head.

The BTB videos are frustrating, for some reason it doesn't appear that pausing/rewind/fast forward controls were included with them, plus there's definitely key commands and mouse clicks that are lost over the video, and no legend as far as i can tell to help you decipher much of it.

I know that if you press shift while panning or zooming the camera in 3d mode it will speed up a lot. I also figured out how to change the terrain with no help from anywhere, I just decided to right click in the window showing the track and a menu pops up allowing you to select the terrain texture you want.

I wish there were an actual beginners/quick reference guide somewhere. It's not as intuitive as it's advertised as being. also I can't seem to figure out how to make a proper tight chicane, or multiple intersecting tracks (like a city street circuit).

It looks like your demo is already up though, and no one has responded this far, but if you're still messing with it and have anything else figured out, stop by and let me know.
 
#1. For "click and drag" there are two known techniques:
- terrain - for drawing new polygons. This does not work for multiple anchors. I think "vertices" is the better name for them. It's possible to draw from vertices, but it produces overlaping mesh. So - draw only from egdes. And yes - it takes time, but can be good option when you want to fill the spaces with regular polygons. The point is that you have to switch options all the time when you want to Move/Pull edges/Split... No keyboard shortcuts yet.
- roads/walls - for making multiple surfaces (cross sections) in them. You must have at least 3 points in road/wall profile (Shape edit mode) if you want to move them in Material edit mode. You can't move them that nothing is left as Material (then you get that pop-up message).
This is about #2 also.
Refer to one of Brendon's videos (I don't remember which one it was, but it's there for sure).
However, some people can't move roads's/walls's points in Material edit mode for some reason, then there are two ways to make it possible - ask somebody to make desired cross-section for you, or make a cross section by editing xml files... Little complicated, but possible.

#3. Go to View-Options and check "Update Timing" radio button - set to "Immediate". Also - for speed it up - switch of Walls, Objects and String Objects (SObjects) from view - on the right top corner of BTB you can see three W,O,S and checked squares - uncheck them then editing terrain will be much easier.

BTB videos talk sometime about older BTB versions, so it can be confusing where the buttons/options are. But they are very clear and helpful, I can say. Watch them couple times and you will know what's going on there :)
 
I have to say, i had the same learning curve at the very beginning. It was extremely frustrating trying to find info but either it was non existent or vey confusing. Now it's all simple and the instructions seems easy and logical but they are really not very good for absolute beginner. The help files are very limited and partly refers to versions not existing.. Everything had to be learned from bits and pieces all over, mostly rFactor info as Evo is simply forgotten by builders. I knew M key and it's functions about 2 months ago as it wasn't mentioned (almost) anywhere..

A new help file is needed, the community has the knowledge to do this. The terms are still unexplained, haven't found a complete beginners guide to 3D yet on any software.. Max tutorials are much worse, you need a freaking month long training to understand the help.
 
This site has a reference for BTB controls, plus a few tutorials:
http://simtrackipedia.wikidot.com/

And it's a community site, so if you register, you can add your own pages.

Yeah, i've found that site usefull. I read it in the beginning but i really didn't understand all as i was very noob Some things slipped by i've had to read those pages many times since. Me adding pages to simtrackpedia...hmmm, i don't think i'm in such a level to create these set-in-stone instructions. I really don't know if the methods and techniques i'm using are the best solutions in the long run..

But what i was thinking is a new help file to BTB. The inbuild help system is far from definitive, it has some inaccuracies and info from earlier/not published releases. That should be the first place to look for help, only the advanced stuff could be left out to places like this.
 

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