WIP Rally MOD - Discussion

[Raphael Buthmann]

Hi guys, I'm feeling this forum a little bit to idle. LOL
Let's move it. I need a help from you. I want to restart my track projects.
These days, I was roaming around youtube and I found some interesting videos of rally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30vI2tzPL9kI was thinking about a mix between Mount Autobahn+Factory Test Track+Mountain Pass.
I'm not very good at sketching tracks, so I wish our community could help me with this project with good ideas. ^^

I want to start with a Track and later i'll think about of the cars. But not too powerful.
It could be a Fiesta , Elise or a simple Clio?

Maybe. But from now on, Ideas. LOL

 

[William Geuze]

It might be worth thinking about making it a sort of rallycross track. This way you can keep it quite short but will allow you to do a better quality track in less time. Maybe it's also nice to find a real location which you can use to stage the track. This way you won't have to 'invent' turns and elevation too much so the track will make sense to some degree. When inventing stuff out of the blue, it can be a tad difficult to keep the scale in check.

Cars shouldn't be an issue, you'll need something to drive them on first anyway

 

[boomer541]

There are several types of rally's bit henerally they are time, speed, distance (TSD) where the participant tries to follow route instuctions to get from one checkpoint to another not javing a clue as to where he/dhe will end up and maintain an average speed for the section.

Special stages are sometimes used where it's flat out flying over a set distance and generally clearly laid out.

Doing this can incoporate taking out a map and selecting the roads to be driven, including special stages.

At least that's the way I remember them when I drove/navigated a few in my misspent youth.

So the first task is to make a map of the roads.

 

[Mr Whippy]

I'd go find some videos of rallying you really like, and then try find where they are, and then get aerial imagery of those bits.

Then try turn those real bits that look great, into a circuit or point to point that isn't too big, but is full of all the best bits you really like!

That way you get the spirit of the real track, and ideas about cool corners/jumps and stuff, but you can be creative with it and not have to worry much about exact accuracy or whatever.
Get the inspiration from reality, but forget about copying it exactly... that seems to get you a right feeling track/course, but without getting bogged down with detail copying!

Then as William said, you can keep it small, keep passion/enthusiasm up, and keep it manageable all while keeping it looking 'right'


Try keep everything to pen/paper/ideas and concepts until you have a super solid idea that you are so passionate about that you can fill every part of the track with nice ideas and graphics and interest for the player.

The biggest single challenge imo is good textures for hedges/trees/scrub and things. Maybe go look through some Richard Burns Rally tracks or similar games and look at how much texture they give up to such things. I bet it's pretty high since it makes up half of the things you will be looking at most of the time after the asphalt and the sky


I really used to love the UK tarmac rally stage on CMR2 I think, or was it CMR1...? There was a red phone box in it any way on the outside of a medium speed bend and I always used to hit it haha

Dave

 

[Harey]

I agree with Whippy really, my only thing is, you might want it to loop back to the start, like just made a small road going to the start. Also I could probably make a copy of my Omni into a rally spec one (yes they were rallied as well). Might take a little while as I have been busy lately, but I'll see what i can do.

 

[William Geuze]

Might be very useful for early testing if Raphael is serious about his idea

 

[Mr Whippy]

I'd go with Harey's plan.

A looping track makes more sense for oodles of reasons.

Right now there is a bug in the point to point system where by if it's set the auto-return toggle doesn't work. It always auto-returns and removes your controls which is annoying.

It's quite inflexible too.

Ie, you can't set the timing starting line ahead of the first spline, so you have to drive onto the splines. That is ok but you lose AI capability because the AI needs a spline to work.
Also the auto-return functionality is quite limited right now being hard-coded to on or off. It's useful but the current options need to be defined per track as some tracks would be better with different settings.
Anyone who played NFS 5 a lot will know that after crossing the finish line cars would often just keep going in a line and crash into stuff, so with Racer there are no splines after the end point for the AI to know that the track might go round a corner etc so you'd get the same behaviour

So I'd go for a loop, or if it's point to point put in a return path with the spline looping right back around so it uses the loop logic and AI can work etc...


Dave

 

[Raphael Buthmann]

I started testing last night, the mesh conformer modifier with 3ds max, to put track in terrain.

It was a mess. LOL I'll try something more time consuming, but the quality might be good overall ^^

 

[William Geuze]

Here is a tip, fit the terrain to the track
Here is something for you to check out, super small test track. You'd need to do a better job as I did at keeping the track not too bumpy or too big of a difference in height vs the spline, but you get the idea I guess. Source files are available if you like.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/51gegp15xrp2kps/Rally_Test.7z

 

[Mr Whippy]

Raphael, the conform tool works ok but obviously the topography is key.

In real life then terrain often does fit to the track (cuttings, embankments etc), but then in other places it's the road that rolls over the terrain.

We see both and it's that which adds interest and realism to a course.



For good results I often use a sub-divided surface on the topography to get it really smooth so the conformed element is then as smooth as possible.

At this stage though it's best to keep things fairly rough and not have any final shapes... I often work in sub-d at this early time and manipulate things manually or with a few points, use conform to automate lots of drag/dropping of verts but then use a mesh smooth over the top of it to smooth out the result a bit.



Ultimately a rally track is defined by it's non-constant nature. Each bit feels/looks a bit different.

A crown profile, a basin one, rising verges at the sides, ditches at the sides, a wall at one side, a cliff at the other, a smooth section at one bit, a rough bit at another.

Variety will be the key to a fun and interesting track


Keep it simple early on, block it out, get a feel for shapes, sizes, scales, flow and everything else.

No matter what, in the end tracks DO take a lot of time. There is no automated or easy way to add realism and interest without just digging in and doing the long haul jobs.

But the thing is, you want to make sure you are not re-doing them if at all possible, that is why blocking out and prototyping is so important


Dave

 

[Mr Whippy]

Oooh, just going through the loft and found an old bag full of games. CMR1 and 2... I wonder if they will install on Win7 hehe

Screamer 4x4 too, that was pretty amazing at the time too. We used to play all these games on LAN between friends. It was quite funny having maybe 8 beige PC's with the accompanying 17"+ CRT screens and 10 Base T networking in a front room

Even more funny was that we'd play stuff like that with keyboards or joysticks... wheels would have been seen as super-exotic back in those days

...it was always a nightmare when someone forgot their t-piece or terminator haha

Dave

 

[Harey]

Oooh, just going through the loft and found an old bag full of games. CMR1 and 2... I wonder if they will install on Win7 hehe

Screamer 4x4 too, that was pretty amazing at the time too. We used to play all these games on LAN between friends. It was quite funny having maybe 8 beige PC's with the accompanying 17"+ CRT screens and 10 Base T networking in a front room

Even more funny was that we'd play stuff like that with keyboards or joysticks... wheels would have been seen as super-exotic back in those days

...it was always a nightmare when someone forgot their t-piece or terminator haha

Dave

I remember Screamer 4x4, though i never bought i remember playing the demo for it lol. I also reinstalled 4x4 Evo 2 last night, and while it is fun it has some bugs in it, like getting stuck between two massive rocks lol.

Also this is what I have of my Omni right now lol

 

[Mr Whippy]

Screamer 4x4 was very good for the time for the awd physics and terrains etc.

Each vehicle was really well executed too, lots of details, sounds and stuff made them feel really right!

It's not quite rallying so leading a little off-topic, but I always like to go get inspiration from genres I enjoyed, and CMR1/2 and Screamer 4x4 are my all-time faves in this genre and get my brain into rallying mode and ideas a bit hehe

Dave

 

[William Geuze]

Raphael, as soon as you have something drivable, it would be nice to have a go at it

 

[Raphael Buthmann]

I'm studying some videos yet.
I'll only have time after june 15th. I'm extremely busy now, making a lot of pieces of choreography to some people.

Can somebody send me any driveable rally car,to test the track? xD

And how do I export a track from 3ds max 2012?

 

[William Geuze]

With that last comment I think a car is the least of your worries
Take a look on racer.nl for lots of documentation on how export a track to racer. It might be useful to check out how that works first and worry about the rally portion of it later.

http://racer.nl/dirs.htm
http://racer.nl/tutorial/development.htm
http://racer.nl/tutorial/newtrack.htm
http://racer.nl/tutorial/shader.htm

 

[Mr Whippy]

Since you are building in Max there is Some1's great exporter for DOF too.

I'm also tinkering with generating the full geometry.ini, spline.ini and special.ini from the ground up from 3DS Max file infos, so you can just create the entire track without touching trackEd.

For now I have an almost working spline output generator, and geometry.ini with flags/lod works good, so for most of the iterative development processes it's fast and efficient!

Dave

 

[Sneer]

Since you are building in Max there is Some1's great exporter for DOF too.

I found one dof exporter at maxplugins, but it's no longer avaiable.
EDIT: Just found the exporter @ page4. Unfortunately no support for newer 3dsmax-versions.
A dof-exporter for 3dsmax would be very handy. Also, it would fasten the workprogress a LOT to export Geometry.ini, spline.ini and special.ini from 3DS Max. Sounds really great, Dave!

Some rallytracks sounds fun! Here's one WRC Car already:
http://www.tracciontrasera.es/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownloaddetails&lid=612

 

[Mr Whippy]

Yeah Sneer, really I think the exporter should be a maxscript.

It's slower but it'd work everywhere and also be easily maintainable by various people with time.

If I get the chance and turn out to have the appropriate skills I'll try write a DOF exporter. In theory it looks fairly simple as the DOF spec is provided by Ruud...
So just populating data chunks, converting to the right binary, and then writing the whole lot to a DOF file in the proper order with appropriate headers.

I don't see Camsinny around much but he's pretty good at this stuff so maybe if he's interested we can get together and try build something to help out people more with a Max direct to Racer workflow


So far splines script is 80% there... the geometry.ini is 99% really... the biggest challenge is special.ini but I think that should be ok too

The best bit is once we share the scripts everyone can improve them when they get the chance and if they want to



But back to rallying, I had a quick play in CMR2 earlier... such a great game!

The tarmac rallies are always my favourites, they were in CMR1 and CMR2... and RBR

Dave

 

[Raphael Buthmann]

What's the unit to racer from 3ds max ?
Meters or a generical one?
--

Well , terrain is pratically done. ^^ I want a rain forest enviroment with downhills and uphills