Some more cool looking renders.. nice job C 
One suggestion (for anyone using my old scenes as a base)... select the back of the interior mirror polys and create a new material for them. I royally screwed that up when I released them and it has the same material ID as the wheels.. hence the back of the mirror often looks chromed or a "funny colour".
Regards,
Ian
One suggestion (for anyone using my old scenes as a base)... select the back of the interior mirror polys and create a new material for them. I royally screwed that up when I released them and it has the same material ID as the wheels.. hence the back of the mirror often looks chromed or a "funny colour".
Regards,
Ian
Yup, true.. I mainly used that as it was somewhat of a flagship game from them for Blitz I think and one I had a great deal of enjoyment from.. just a pretty good example of what can be achieved with Blitz.. I still love the 80s classics even today
If only my ex hadn't binned my Amiga and too many disks to count 
Sorry for OT again.
Regards,
Ian
Indeed.. sure beats the hell out of what most 8 year olds may come up with:
10 PRINT "I AM T3H K00L!!!!!!!11111one"
20 GOTO 10I was learning BASIC from books at the age 8 (which in theory, takes no skill either as I was copy-typing).. it was the fundamentals of what I know today... slowly but surely, learning the most important part of programming (IMO).. how to understand logic. If you can understand the logic behind coding, the language you ultimately use is a minor step. I know VERY little of Delphi for example, but as much is similar to C++ but backwards, I can follow the logic and convert (some) Delphi code into C++. If Shaun learns the logic.. who knows, 5 years time he maybe releasing an app to parallel something like Trillian (I don't use IM apps, but I hear this is popular).
Kids should be encouraged, not discouraged.
Regards,
Ian
Last edited by Ian.H, .
If you want something "simple" for game creation, try something like BlitzMax or Blitz3D.. both are BASIC on steroids
I used to use BlitzBasic when that was the only product in their line 10 years ago on my Amiga (if anyone remembers the classic 'SkidMarkz' game.. that was coded in BlitzBasic too).. and took me about 3 hours to knock up a simple space invaders type game in Blitz3D on the PC
Not free unfortunately, but BASIC is easy enough to pick up and you can get some pretty cool effects with minimal effort
Regards,
Ian
I don't see how.
I watched a repeat of Top gear the other night that I missed the original of.. where Clarkeson was driving an NSX at Laguna Seca on some Gran Turismo version and then tried for real. We all know GT is far from a sim by any stretch of the imagination, but as he said, if nothing else, there's no fear factor when sitting in your chair at home.. ignoring for now lack of G-forces and other crucial information for real racing.
Going on this, there's absolutely no comparison between driving a car in a sim and driving a car for real, unless you're in a £multi-million real simulation unit.
In most sims that do have "real content", I can put in lap times relative to real professional drivers.. I can also drive a car hard if I want on a real road / track.. could I enter the BTCC for example and perform well? Not a chance in hell! yet sitting in front of my screen, I'd be in the top 5 in every race and would probably kick professional driver's arses as they're used to having the crucial info available to them and more than likely would make a lot of mistakes in a sim that we (sim racers) have learnt to pick up on / adjust to due to the lack of those crucial datas
Regards,
Ian
Ahah.. thanks for that info Becky.. I guess I should have read the SMX format myself a little better (graphics coding is something I've never really looked into yet, so have skipped over a lot of the actual 3D things).
In this case then, it seems converting a track would be a lot more hassle than rebuilding it. I guess the only useful thing in this regards then would be to use the SMX mesh as a guide / "blueprint", advantage of using a mesh over a track map as I started to would be you'd see elevations / cambers much easier if you wanted to do a better job of replicating it rather than driving and trying to memorise by feel alone.
Thanks again for the info.. normally I'm pretty good at RTFM.. but I guess I severely overlooked reading what I needed to in this case
Regards,
Ian
In this case then, it seems converting a track would be a lot more hassle than rebuilding it. I guess the only useful thing in this regards then would be to use the SMX mesh as a guide / "blueprint", advantage of using a mesh over a track map as I started to would be you'd see elevations / cambers much easier if you wanted to do a better job of replicating it rather than driving and trying to memorise by feel alone.
Thanks again for the info.. normally I'm pretty good at RTFM.. but I guess I severely overlooked reading what I needed to in this case
Regards,
Ian
Just realised you're from Brazil... if by V8 stock cars you were referring to the Brazilian stock cars.. now _they'd_ be cool! on any track
Regards,
Ian
Nice one dude
I remember seeing my first renders starting to take shape.. was cool to see them appear.
A few things to fix, but it'll all come with time and practice.. keep at it and you'll have some cool renders appearing
Regards,
Ian
You don't need a list for that.. if it works, it's within limitations, if it doesn't, it's not.
Umm.. can I share what you're smoking?
But it's not real, it's exactly that, a fantasy. There's already too many misfits in this world who can't differentiate between real and fantasy.
I wasn't being rude.. but now you're saying that Eric is crap at his job? and that we need pros (not amateurs) designing / modelling? Personally I think Eric's done a great job with the cars.. it's his track skills that worry me.
Ovals are............... :sleep2: irrespective of the car.
Regards,
Ian
3DS Lighting Bible (I think that's the title anyway) is a great book.. 450 pages of nothing but lighting discussion
Regards,
Ian
hmm, don't suppose you could send me one to have a look at could you, please?
I've got no interest in putting it in any game or anything of the sorts (have long stopped messing with rF as it's crap and ISI are liars).. and even if I did, I'd ask for permission just as I did about converting the cars.. I'm really just curious as to what you can actually get from the SMX meshes in that respect and I guess might be cool to try and use a section for a personal render or 2 if some info was still intact
Regards,
Ian
I don't get this "we need real cars and tracks" stuff...
The majority of people sit in an office chair with a £50 plastic steering wheel looking at a flat monitor... THIS IS NOT REAL! so what difference does it make if there happens to be a real car shape or not?
Same for tracks.. no matter how much people want to believe they're some famous racing driver, they're not.. so why does it matter if there's a Monza or a Nozma? The odds on most people driving the actual circuit are down in the fractions of a percent.. driving it in a game doesn't mean you've driven the circuit.. so I really fail to see the importance of such things
Fictional content is far more interesting IMO.. you've got a chance to use your imagination. I love creating fictional tracks.. the only real track I considered doing was Goodwood, but ultimately stuck with fictional where I could decide what I wanted, didn't have to care about safety and to just be imaginative.
Regards,
Ian
The majority of people sit in an office chair with a £50 plastic steering wheel looking at a flat monitor... THIS IS NOT REAL! so what difference does it make if there happens to be a real car shape or not?
Same for tracks.. no matter how much people want to believe they're some famous racing driver, they're not.. so why does it matter if there's a Monza or a Nozma? The odds on most people driving the actual circuit are down in the fractions of a percent.. driving it in a game doesn't mean you've driven the circuit.. so I really fail to see the importance of such things
Fictional content is far more interesting IMO.. you've got a chance to use your imagination. I love creating fictional tracks.. the only real track I considered doing was Goodwood, but ultimately stuck with fictional where I could decide what I wanted, didn't have to care about safety and to just be imaginative.
Regards,
Ian
http://ds-autos.digiserv.net/nfo/12
I listed all the required textures for all the scenes I created.
If you don't want to convert the textures yourself, grab a copy of the LX4 scene and extract the textures and delete the rest
Regards,
Ian
I listed all the required textures for all the scenes I created.
If you don't want to convert the textures yourself, grab a copy of the LX4 scene and extract the textures and delete the rest
Regards,
Ian
How does creating a poll have anything to do with spending money?
Put it this way.. if I wasn't sure about a new box to buy, I'd ask a few friends "in the know" over IRC or down the pub for their opinions.. surely you have a few friends you could pose the question to too?
It's got nothing to do with money but about what's good for the goose and the gander.
Regards,
Ian
Everyone else is told to use the search feature, not to start new, repetitive threads.. why should you be any different? Hell.. you replied in your other thread only today too! Hardly a good example to be setting is it? or are you of the mindset of "don't do as I do, do as I say?"
IMO, you just wanted to feel important and add a poll (what this recent fixation is with people starting polls for just about anything is beyond me)
and why many seem to have to ask the entire forum for an opinion for some things seems weird too.. can't anyone think for themselves these days? This seems to be very common when there's a serious lack of LFS progress and people just post anything for something to do.Regards,
Ian
"... I would anyway"
You're getting as bad as jak and n00b and seem to be posting for the sheer hell of seeing your own name in posts.
Especially with road tyres! Funny how I can slide a street car around on a field and drive off down the road as though I'd never touched the field.. but it definitely doesn't work like that in LFS.. you end up sliding about all over the place.. even with mud caked in the tread, my car still doesn't slide around. The tyre dirt physics are pretty much a gimmick unfortunately and about as far from reality as you can get.. but I guess I shouldn't complain, it's just yet another half-cocked "it'll do for now" solution, like aero, damage, collision detection (that should have been fixed back in S1 days surely as it's _critical_ to online racing as car's in reality don't _ever_ head for the moon!)
While the theory is a nice idea, like most sim features in LFS currently, it's so far off the mark it'd have been better not to add it at all... if something's worth doing, it's worth doing right.. but LFS seems to be more than content with "it's in.. we'll leave it as-is for 2+ years and hope we don't get / ignore any complaints" :rolleyes: while we add the important things, like allowing people to program new buttons into the UI... YAY! \o/
Personally I think with Scawen's recent line of thinking he should forget LFS and start working on a new version of Uplink. I thought LFS was a _race sim_ not a hacking sim
Regards,
Ian
Never used it, but will take your word for it.
They certainly appear to be whenever I do create them, or import things as a spline, such as vector images until I convert them to a plane.
You don't have to draw / model every little bump on a track either.. you think I sit here creating manual bumps for washboard effects for my own tracks?
That said, it'd explain why all LFS tracks are almost as smooth as a baby's arse and why cars float on the blackwood back straight as they go down the slope instead of looking like gravity is at work.Regards,
Ian
And one reason for this is shills. norton shills were rife in alt.comp.virus a few years ago. I don't frequent that group much these days, but remember many of them back in the day.. sad little f.................
Regards,
Ian
hmm, seems deggis is pretty much on the mark regarding the task manager. Infact, I spent about 4 hours a few weeks ago cleaning 250+ viruses / adware / spyware off of my bro's boss's box.. how many appeared in the task manager? about 4.. how were these represented? as either rundll32 and / or winlogon. Taskmanager is bollox and won't tell you _what's_ running those processes.. I only found out with Process Explorer from SysInternals.
Most malware these days use the likes of BHOs that affect explorer or other "innocent" binaries that Joe Sixpack wouldn't have a clue about as it's normal to see them in TaskManager.
This is 2007.. we're talking RootKits and other such technology written by professional programmers for spammers and other scum with too much (stolen) cash to throw around.. not a few spotty kids in a bedroom reading from a visual basic for dummies book
Regards,
Ian
Most malware these days use the likes of BHOs that affect explorer or other "innocent" binaries that Joe Sixpack wouldn't have a clue about as it's normal to see them in TaskManager.
This is 2007.. we're talking RootKits and other such technology written by professional programmers for spammers and other scum with too much (stolen) cash to throw around.. not a few spotty kids in a bedroom reading from a visual basic for dummies book
Regards,
Ian
I have 2 anti-virus softwares installed on this box... neither are run in TSR mode though.. I manually scan anything I need to and normally only use F-Prot, ClamWin for a 2nd opinion of I'm suspicious of a file that F-Prot hasn't yet detected, not that ClamWin is 100% reliable either, no AV is as it's always the cat in a cat and mouse chase.
That said, I have ~3Gb of viruses here and always used to F-Prot and Kav... but Kav got extremely bloated.. but both were "the apps" to have for VX collections for the best naming conventions yada yada. Installing more than one AV doesn't necessarily make you paranoid or stupid
As for firewalls that people are mentioning, any bolt-on windoze "firewall" is more of a gimmick than anything else (especially zone alarm as you can DoS boxes running that with a simple nmap scan
). A firewall should be built into the kernel and run on a separate box. windoze should never be directly connected to the net anyway thus rendering a bolt-on toy unnecessary Regards,
Ian
Strange as I can produce the same effect in rF / GTR2 too by making the tyre radius size in the TBC file bigger than the actual mesh / coords as the mesh is graphical only and the TBC file actually affects the dimensions there.
You'll find a lot of queries on rF forums from new modders asking why the tyres are either sunk into the ground or appear to be floating because they just copied an existing TBC file but have modelled the wheels a different size.
Again I don't know if LFS works on a similar principle but would imagine it does in some way or other. Having the cars drive on "invisible polys" (splines are just lines, so I wouldn't have thought they'd be used else it'd be like a train or Scalectrix
) would be a pointless resource hog as it'd require twice as many polys for the entire track for no reason.. one reason GTR2's wet look tracks (if you can believe that effect is meant to be wet looking ) is such a performance hog is the reflection is created by a duplicate of the track polys, but raised by 2mm or similar.Regards,
Ian
hmm, not sure I follow that.. I thought the track polys were the drivable surface.. they certainly are in rF / GTR2 etc.
When I build a track from scratch (using example figures), I start with a 10x12 (length / width) metre plane split into 16 polys. That's my tarmac area. I then extrude width ways and create an extra 2 or 3 rows of polys for the grass. I then map the polys with the respective materials. Using the array tool, I clone the plane 10 times to create a 100metre length and weld the required vertices to create a single mesh. I then clone again as I need and apply a bend modifier to create the shapes and once the loop's complete, use an FFD box for elevations.
I can now export the say.. 30 100metre lengths of track as GMT files.
Providing my tarmac and grass materials match up with the respective entries in the TDF file.. I can now drop the meshes into rF along with a SCN file so it knows what meshes to load and bingo! I'd have a drivable track.
The same is for conversions, except the polys are already in place. The only time I ever use splines in track modelling is for adding curbs as I normally select the edges where the track meets the grass where I want the curbs to be, clone them as a spline. Create the curb as a plane and map it.. then use the created spline as a guide to position the curb.
All driving is done on the polys which I suspect to be the same in LFS too as there's a gap in the mesh on most Aston tracks (where the National config I think turns right off the start / finish "straight").. you can see it as a white line from a distance.. but if you drive over it very slowly with hard enough suspension, you can feel the car hit a "bump" as it finds the edge of the polys. I maybe wrong obviously, but I got the exact same car response when I had some gaps in my first ever track attempt for rF.
Regards,
Ian
"No texturing info" includes lack of mapping coords too Becky?
I took what I decided to be the "easy route" for recreating them.. grabbed the large track plan views that a few people have uploaded here, mapped them to a plane below the surface height I wanted and started adding polys using the track image as a blueprint of sorts. I guessed it would be quicker and easier to rebuild and map as I go than trying to map around corners of a single pre-built mesh. I've done it in the past to fix errors / minor changes, but wouldn't fancy doing it for the majority of a track
Regards,
Ian
No idea where it actually originated from, but I grabbed a copy a loooong time ago when RSC was still LFS' "official forum".
As for asking permission, any _respectable_ modder does.. which appears to be the minority unfortunately.. but in regards to LFS, it'd be silly not to as when I asked about converting the cars, I was told providing I gave proper credits and a URL reference back to the LFS site, there was no problem (is also stated in the readme of the CMX viewer which I didn't know at the time). Naturally giving the proper credit isn't a problem, or shouldn't be
By what Becky has said above, it sounds like she's got the same results as the old BL1 mesh available... a single mesh for the entire track, with no textures or mapping coords.. so getting the actual track into rF for example would be pretty easy if you just used a single texture for testing.
To do it right, you'd have to go around the entire mesh and break it up into smaller meshes.. track sections of maybe 100 metres and whatnot, depending on poly count in the vacinity.
You'd then have to UVMap the entire collection of meshes and apply relevant textures.. for rF, this means 3 shaders for each material, 2 of those shaders (DX8 and DX9) containing at least 3 textures each.
Now you can export the meshes in GMT format and create a .SCN file and load into rF.
The "driving surface" I can only assume meant what determines grass / tarmac / sand etc. If so, this is easily done with rF's track .TDF (terrain) file.. so you'd name your tarmac material as 'ROAD_01' and grass as 'GRAS_MAIN', sand traps as 'GRVL_DEEP' etc etc. These will then match up to the entries in the .TDF file and rF would use those to determine what kind of surface you were on.. it's all determined by specific material names (tarmac is prepended with 'ROAD' by default, so you can use ROAD_01, ROAD_STREET, ROADWHATEVERYOULIKE yada yada). All pretty simple stuff really.. just time consuming to do it right
Regards,
Ian
FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG