RELEASED-wip Vancouver City circuit 98

[RJL]

It would likely be good to have someone have a look at them. I did 2 sets, one where the track cameras are in game and a roadside type one but they arent that great. Its the same system for the Jumbotrons so some camera work there would likely make those a lot better too.

The AI could likely use some work too. Just have to be careful of the location of the pit one vs the one coming out of T5 because if those are too close it gives the wrong way message.

Current list of to dos before this version is ready as an initial version

-Move tracksounds
-Redo remainder of trees, retexture and replace
-Finish track lights and add a few city lights and vehicle lights. Im not going to spend a ton of time on the city lights.
-adjust some textures, Pit road texture, start box texture. May just remove those.
-Start lights on main straight working.
-Final touches to adjusted pit wall.
-Fix some tents and things that are misaligned or not touching the ground
-Fix the skytrain mesh and redo UVwrap. Its hollow from the bottom as it was never designed to be moved.
-Put the original vehicles back in place for this version.
-make a second surfaces ini with less bumps. Im not sure people will like it as bumpy as I do.
-fix balloon and blimp location in ini and files as i have it in a master but would like to include.
-double check ext config and clean it up. its a mess right now.
-make a readme with credits.
-Likely a couple of other things. The textures dont look so blown out now so hopefully people could test them in a variety of conditions.

Possible
-redo a few textures so that they are combined into one instead of having 8 for one mesh.

Always prefer circuits to be realistically bumpy as a personal preference.
Annoys me when modders (in general) make a circuit so smooth as to remove any character from it.
Unless, of course, the real life circuit is smooth to begin with / .
But hey - just a personal preference.

 

[JrC]

Always prefer circuits to be realistically bumpy as a personal preference.
Annoys me when modders (in general) make a circuit so smooth as to remove any character from it.
Unless, of course, the real life circuit is smooth to begin with / .
But hey - just a personal preference.

Its got some nasty bumps especially mid turn 5. I need to put the one out of the science world corner in as well. I like it that way but it may not be everyone's cup of tea
I also gave the manholes some vibration.

To give you a sense of the the texture update

here is the old trees... and how pixelated they are up close

Im trying to UVmap some new textures and this would also remove the original set up where the tree branches and the trunk were different objects.
These are the new trees however I have some color balancing to do.

 

[JrC]

Some progress and some timelines extensions LOL

I got the lights done and then looked in game at where they needed to be added and did that.

Let there be light!

More lights

Back half lit up

Did a race last night in the dark and it was pretty great. No background ambiance light yet but it functions at midnight now.

I got the pit car markers moved to AC crew so only the cars present have a pit marker.

Then I found Lilskis posts on why conversion tracks arent great. I had already attempted a groove layer but it sucked because of how the layer is built for the older tracks.

But he details how to subdivide it and fix it so I learned to do that... which required me to learn how to hotkey commands in Blender... trust me... learn that if you havent...
My workflow is still an issue but its getting better

We got to here

And now I need to test the different groove layers I created to see how the subdivisions work. I made about 3 different types to test by seperating the grooves and changing their settings...


This also required me to learn UVmapping in much more detail... but thanks to @NightEye , I found how to do this in more detail with the grooves.dds he provided as a guide on the AC forums...

@maruto dont worry... you have lots of time to work on 3R Lol

 

[JrC]

I redid the trees after seeing LilSki's post on having all the trees on a single DDS

Here is what Ive worked on. Its dropped the image quality a fair bit so Im thinking about maybe doing a HD one for really close trackside trees and keeping this for a lower def one for distance trees. Here is the single dds on the right that isnt mapped properly showing all trees on the Y frame and the one on the left mapped properly and its the one in the top left corner of the the wrong one. It was way too bright in game so ive already turned that down but might need to do more work on the actual layers in GIMP.

Then all of them mapped properly. Coloring is still odd in some places. Some of the planes are too dark.

Figured out the groove layer a bit too but my mapping was terrible.

but managed to get that worked out a bit better. There are still square ends with how its set up but I should be able to build it into a single mesh now.
I had to really work on the mapping and the positioning of the alpha...

I added a bump to the end of the Science world corner but its too much and its tossing the backs of the cars into the air briefly turning into this...

Ill need to turn that down a bit...

Overall, some of the grunt work is over. The trees will reduce the dip a fair bit because the original trees had seperate material and mesh for the trunk and the tree shape was 6 sided. Using a single material for all of them using block transform should really help. Im thinking I will do another in higher res for the up close trees as shown earlier which was single, high res dds for that tree material.

 

[JrC]

Damn... that looks so good now...

 

[JrC]

I finally got shadow play working so I got an onboard lap with the AI as kind of a WIP update.
No fancy intros or outros and its unlisted as Im only detailing my progress here.

One small issue is that I noticed that in content manager, it doesnt show how many laps Ive driven on track. How do I get it so it records the total KM on the track?

 

[RJL]

I finally got shadow play working so I got an onboard lap with the AI as kind of a WIP update.
No fancy intros or outros and its unlisted as Im only detailing my progress here.

One small issue is that I noticed that in content manager, it doesnt show how many laps Ive driven on track. How do I get it so it records the total KM on the track?

Looks incredible to me.

 

[Johnr777]

I finally got shadow play working so I got an onboard lap with the AI as kind of a WIP update.
No fancy intros or outros and its unlisted as Im only detailing my progress here.

One small issue is that I noticed that in content manager, it doesnt show how many laps Ive driven on track. How do I get it so it records the total KM on the track?

Your sector objects/dummies in place?

 

[JrC]

Your sector objects/dummies in place?

Its registering lap times... seemingly correctly... early on it was giving some odd times back as if they were out of sequence but its been fine for ages...

Is there anywhere I need to define length or does it do it dynamically.

 

[Johnr777]

Its registering lap times... seemingly correctly... early on it was giving some odd times back as if they were out of sequence but its been fine for ages...

Is there anywhere I need to define length or does it do it dynamically.

Might need to have at least 2 timing sectors for that feature to work I think.

Track length can be specified in its json file

 

[JrC]

Might need to have at least 2 timing sectors for that feature to work I think.

Track length can be specified in its json file

Sorry. I should have qualified it better... it wasnt laps not registering but in CM it shows how many KM one has driven on track. I got the Indy cars after I started the work on the track so all 1900km of the 99 car are on the track basically but in CM it shows 0 driven on track.

I do have two sectors with after the start finish ones and they do seem to register sector times and in crew chief he yells at me when my sector times are off .

 

[JrC]

@fughettaboutit

Got a groveline generated with AI line helper as I would like the groove line to match the AI driving line but Im getting this error when trying to import the CSV using the script addon.

Any idea whats wrong?

Python: Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Users\tyjer\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.91\scripts\addons\io_import_accsv\__init__.py", line 97, in execute
return import_csv.load(context, self.properties.filepath, self.scaling, self.doDoubleCheck)
File "C:\Users\tyjer\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.91\scripts\addons\io_import_accsv\..\io_import_accsv\import_csv.py", line 65, in load
meshname = mesh.name
ReferenceError: StructRNA of type Object has been removed
location: <unknown location>:-1

EDIT - got it imported but its only the first corner for some reason. will fiddle with a bit

Edit 2. working

Thanks fughettaboutit

 

[JrC]

Pit Road looks much better now. Its amazing how dull and lifeless it was without the crews.

Looks good at night too...

The crews also have their own lights as Im sure working in the dark on those screens would be a health and safety issue

 

[JrC]

Groove mesh was a nightmare. Mostly because Im a noob. but I got it reworked after a lot of hours. Still some problems with the alpha blend at the corners and if there is a better AI done then I will need to redo it but for now it works.
Just fiddling with the settings on darkness and timing. Will have a very light pit groove as well.

 

[JrC]

Still some issues but likely not long for a beta

got the first camera facing ini set up for the stands in turn one

also got the pit stop signs customized. some wont change for some reason but a bunch either had custom or updated with the new one...
I may include with track but you will have to manually inject into car skin folders. I couldnt make all of them do it on the track by default

and a custom one for Greg and Vancouver.

this didnt go well for the Bud car

 

[JrC]

Trying to tidy up issues and get some things I didnt get right corrected. I have the original conversion and when I looked at it I realized I took out the billboards so had to do some stuff like replacing those.

Also got more of Crowd facing INI done and the groove is blended well now. Screenshots are getting better too...

Hopefully someone can do better cams as I had to do these in freelook. Now that the Cam facing crowd is in there my cams are blocked off more. Should be able to get a video of the original conversion and the latest version up as well to compare the differences.

 

[JrC]

Unfortunately, my blinds in the window fell out of their holder this week onto my 7 year old logitech g19 or whatever the predecessor to the g29 was and when it landed on the wheel housing it must have broken something because the shifter and pedals have power and register in game but the wheel is dead...

So I have to wait till next Thursday till the new g29 shows up but on the plus side the FFB was getting sloppy and I can use that fancy dial for the turbo...

@luchian has been kind enough to allow ACmods.net to cover the race in conjunction with the local province newspaper...

Im just not sure who he will have man the souvenir tent

Im working on some optimizations and improvements like creating 3 different building heights out of the base city background and then putting all those on a single texture.

This will take the 6 background meshes with buildings, each with their own mesh and texture to a single object with a single texture even though the buildings will be varied by a high, mid and low height.

 

[JrC]

 

[JrC]

Costs a few fps but tried the other pit setup

g29 came 2 days early which is nice. That little red dial sucks though.

 

[JrC]

couple of updates.

Ive gone a little nuts on the AC crew objects. I just really like it because it customizes the track to the cars racing assuming they have an AC crew dds.
Ive added some extra crowd barriers and signs that use the AC crew function.

Ive done some optimisation on the textures as I really understand now how bad the conversions are for the materials. For example, one building is 8 materials.
Im going to work on this a bit because I do need the performance back with the pits the way they are now. There is no way I could run the full 37 cars. Im on 27 now and getting about 70 fps with everything maxed out but that would dip considerably in a field where the cars where different I suspect.
For example, I built a billboard dds and have mapped all the billboards to a single dds rather then having a single one for each billboard although I haven't done this with the walls yet.
There is lots of opportunity to combine objects and materials to reduce the DIP of the game.
The block transform on the trees will help but that's the last big job I need to do. Finish off replacing all the old trees and optimizing the new ones not only in mapping but in placement while doing a bit of creative hiding of some barren looking spots in the background.

The groove is good but is 31 pieces right now to make sure it looks right before I join it into a single mesh. I've added some pass grooves off the main groove to simulate the AI occasionally coming off the line to pass into some of the main corners for passing.

The camera facing INI is massive right now too as I try to tweak the mesh locations and count on spectators.
Overall that looks much better so I want to combine those into a smaller number of objects once I've got it.


I have another animation in the form of a working flight path to YVR (Vancouver Intl Airport) with some 737s flying overhead with a random delay when they land. Its pretty cool having the shadow pass over the track as you are driving. I tried to add lights but apparently you cant add sounds and blinking lights to meshes that are wrapped as animations. I tried separating a part of the plane to have it be a blinking light for nighttime but what happens is once its two materials it seems to break the Mesh wrap with CSP animation. In any case, I couldn't attach a plane sound or create a blinking light so they are slightly emissive at night.
I added a bunch of light pollution as there should be so that helps make it seem like its not floating in space.

At this point I'm obsessing over minor details so I think its time to wrap this one up and move on to a scratch build because I'm getting to the point where its how the meshes were built that's limiting me so I'm better off taking that forward and building the track up with this stuff in mind and with CSP stuff considered.
The LIDAR version will take awhile anyways so I think getting this finished off and optimized will allow me to move on to the slow boil on a LIDAR version.

I'll see if I can get permission to convert the Edmonton city airport track and do the same updates in the background while trying to scratch build the LIDAR Vancouver version with all 3 layouts.
Maybe @maruto and I can work on scratch built Canadian tracks long term.

I want to say a version might be ready for some testing in a couple weeks but likely 4-6.