RELEASED-wip Vancouver City circuit 98

Discussion in 'Tracks' started by JrC, Feb 2, 2021.

  1. JoeK

    JoeK New Member

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    The WIP looks awesome. Love the 'live' video screens. Man - that brings back memories - especially the view from the track.
     
  2. JrC

    JrC Active Member

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    Glad to hear it does bring back memories. Hopefully you can relive some of that and even better, drive it...

    I got the trees done yesterday for the most part besides those Hi def ones in have down the main straight. I think I will still replace those as the 9 tree dds finally has good coloring after a bunch of work yesterday.
    I think I replace a couple hundred trees manually.

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    I also figured out the start lights and semaphore INI so there are working start lights and I added pit lights from a free fbx off the net.

    Not sure about the hanging one. May move it.
    still a couple issues with the groove as where I joined it shows a seam but I did some work on the dds and it blends way better now too..

    Getting there.... hopefully an alpha soon. Ive got the batch size up to 1000 now and gained back about 5-6 fps by combining objects yesterday too.

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  3. JrC

    JrC Active Member

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    Got the last bushes replaced with Lilacs for some color. The old bush was two meshes with 3 planes each so this Y bush thats block transformed shouldnt cost anything since its one less material but a bigger single texture

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    I actually got most of the last work done so now if I tweak the camera facing layers a bit, I just have some mesh aligning to do... maybe 4-6 is closer then I thought to send out to a few people to test.
     
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  4. RJL

    RJL New Member

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    Love and appreciate your passion and attention to detail.
     
  5. JrC

    JrC Active Member

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    Cheers!

    I wanted to really flush it out because I love the track but also as a proof of concept so if I approached anyone about converting their track, they could see the end result and that it was in good hands.

    Im a little suprised Ive gotten this far but with each little success it would insulate me from the multiple failures to follow :lol:...

    Hopefully it is a worthy addition to the game.

    Still a few odds and sods yet but the groove and the trees were the heavy lifting.

    Looks slightly better then this

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    Last edited: May 3, 2021
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  6. JrC

    JrC Active Member

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    I reached out to the original authors to see if I can include. Some people dont like them but I like the balloons and the blimps.
    The airspace is pretty busy though :lol:

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  7. JrC

    JrC Active Member

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    balloon is good to go.

    I updated the plane texture to give it some color too. You cant see it really most of the time except on the tail but its there. I thought about Air Canada but I prefer Westjet...

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    you can see a bit of the pass groove here

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    I got into the woods with keyframe animation so I need to stop doing new stuff and finish the last grind 10% percent and clean everything up.
     
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  8. Brandydo

    Brandydo Member

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    Are you planning this as a current day track or a period (late-90s) piece? If the latter, you could always use Canadian Airlines...

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    Looks like you've poured in a lot of work to upgrade the circuit, and it looks great so far. When you shift gears to the Lidar version, do you think you'll redo some of the buildings (ie. the Science Center, Arena)...having spent a lot of time on the 3R buildings I can say it's a lot of work, but is really rewarding.
     
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  9. JrC

    JrC Active Member

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    Now you have asked me some tough questions :lol:....

    Whats happened is that this was always intended to be as representative of the actual 98 track as possible (for a 10 year old conversion). Really it was going to be a shot in the dark to see if I could pull off some modding in Assetto. Ive done coding and retexturing for other games but Ive never worked with Blender before.

    Whats happened is that the way AC works with AI... the pit road will always give a wrong way warning if built to 98 spec.
    So essentially, there is no real way to make the fully accurate version. So to your question, the fact I couldnt keep it truly accurate led me to make a few inaccurate changes such as the lilacs etc.
    The next challenge is the the races are so old that we don't have the HI def versions to watch. I watched a 96 race in van on youtube a couple weeks ago and its not the greatest views and not great on board. I even had trouble finding a hi def version of the Players logo. Most of the others were easy though.

    I double checked and Westjet was founded in 96 or something so "technically" the company existed or I likely would have gone with Air Canada. Canadian is interesting. I don't remember that airline...
    Also I have had to update some portions of the track with some vehicles that may not be period accurate also because the originals really stood out as making the game look dated in comparision to all the other newer updates and obviously the beautiful indy car models.

    So the short answer is that I take it into consideration and try but its a bit of a losing battle on this one.

    For the Lidar version it would be scratch, but Im not a modeler or a texture artist so it could very well outside the scope of my ability.
    Ill take an honest run at it but Ive never been the strongest creator and am typically better at saying, hey this would be cool and adding it on...
    That being said... if I could pull it off, it would essentially allow for all 3 layouts, the pre 98 version which ran along BC place, which is the one I really want because I played it on CART RACING 95 with a Mad Catz wheel strapped to a lazy boy on playstation 1 and it was awesome, the 98 version (which will always have the wrong pit road) and the 99 on version which will still have that problem but they added the extra turn in the last corner as you passed pit lane...

    That would be ideal so in that case, having the buildings means being able to use them for all three layouts.
    Also the LIDAR I can pull is from 2016 or 18 I believe so its impossible to get the actual road Lidar from that time. Annddd part of the Lidar is missing because it looks like the back secton of the track on the far side of science world is was purpose build as part of it was a park so I will have to take another like Roads Lidar and dummy it in there.

    So there are a lot of gaps to making it perfectly era specific...
     
    Last edited: May 7, 2021
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  10. Brandydo

    Brandydo Member

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    Fair enough. And yeah, totally get that about the Lidar. I've pondered a couple older street circuits, knowing full well that some sections have been purpose built and it may end up being less than a fully accurate recreation.

    Canadian merged with Air Canada sometime around 2000 if I recall correctly...predated my air travel days but I've always remembered that tail design from photos.

    It will be great to see how the project progresses. Funny how you mention some of the nostalgia...I've off and on thought about recreating Chatham from SCGT days.

    I don't want to fully commit to anything, but I may be able to assist with modeling some of the main buildings later this year. Never was a 3d modeler until it finally clicked with me a few months back and now I've modeled half of 3R's trackside buildings.
     
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  11. JrC

    JrC Active Member

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    I think the way to look at is that its the best we have to work with and it would be awesome to have that as those tracks are harder to come by.

    I find myself much more drawn to temp road courses over purpose built and oval for some reason. So its been great seeing so many of the older ones like Dallas and others being worked on.

    Im not sure any game I can remember has the pre 98 layout besides Cart... I dont think F1 99-02 had it.

    I must admit, even running this track behind these models take me back because of how the back of the cars look and how they move with the bumps of the track...

    Ill see if I can recreate a bit of that Canadian logo for the texture but ive learnt not to focus on it too much because a lot of it is essentially invisible to the player for driving. The tail section is the visible part though.
    I wanted to vary the planes up a bit anyways.

    Would love to have your help on the buildings but dont worry about commitments... The scratch built version would be a long process I guess and Im not in a rush and this is a hobby for fun.
    I would likely have to take a run at modeling a bunch of stuff anyways like the upper roadways and skytrain.

    So start the learning curve all over again :lol:...
    Would love to see a day where I booted AC up and selected Vancouver city circuit and had to pick between one of the three layouts....

    On the plus side the Lidar Data is more complete for the Pre 98 version because it ran closer into the city and didnt run the Science world side so it would be basically the best anyone could do with whats available.
     
  12. JrC

    JrC Active Member

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    its not the greatest but you wont be able to see most of the imperfections
    Its on the same DDS so wont hurt FPS

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    LilSki also said that the blimp had been stolen so much it was moot but to give Tberg credit for it so I will do that. Blimp will be included and people can tweak that with the model.ini if they want to change probability to 0 for it or the balloon so it doesnt show up.
     
    Last edited: May 7, 2021
  13. Brandydo

    Brandydo Member

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    Looks great! To me it's always the small details that really make a track stand out amongst others.

    I saw Toronto was released today...with Vancouver and 3R in progress, Canadian tracks are nicely covered right now. if only Westwood was still around...
     
  14. JrC

    JrC Active Member

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    Its ok in game. The lighting is off on it somehow... the nose glows a bit... :lol:..

    I checked out Toronto and it looks great. The track bumps are excessive right now and it needs 24 pits but the track looks very impressive.

    I'm about 10-15 small jobs from having a decent initial version which I will label v0.099999999w
     
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  15. JrC

    JrC Active Member

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    quick tip on toronto, the bumps are actually their own kn5 so you can delete them out of the model.ini and the track feels less... well bumpy.. not sure what else it removes but it gets rid of the huge ones. They feel the same as the ones I had a couple pages back where the ai was basically sideways as it came out of Science world corner.

    I realized yesterday that a bunch of rails in the stands etc were not mirrored so I spent some time doing that and cleaning up the surface texture. It was initially about 20 faces for the whole surface and in order to not have it showing through and colliding with some other surfaces I turned it from tris to quads then subdivided and then hacked out the road and water surface so it can be lined up better with all the walls etc. That of course led to some other issues.
    I adjusted the green light emissive as it was too bright, adjusted the tv screen emissive too.
    I upgraded a few textures to their proper mappings including the props in the pitlane. That looks much better.
    I used part of the pole from the free traffic light to create a supporting structure for the pedestrian bridge in the middle similar but not exactly like the real one and added a working light to it similar to the pit entry exit lights.

    I also realized I turned off extraFX in CM so when I turned that back on all the marbles came back.

    I really just need to tidy up where the pit groove meets the start and end of the main groove, its not blending well, replace the trees that are still on the single texture in the mainstraight and its not a lot, pull out a couple of unused sounds, figure out why my street lights work but arent emissive anymore and finish some last combining and optimizations, then Ill send it to a few people to make sure it actually works on their end.
    Then post a link in here. It wont go on other sites for now.

    keep in mind that means I wont have all the background lighting done and the animation on the skytrain isnt perfect all the time and a few other issues will likely be present but ive cleaned it up a lot in the last week or so in terms of those little things that show up in replays and in game.

    Hopefully @Leonardo Ratafia can look at the cams. The Jumbotrons arent working perfectly either and they work like cams so maybe we can figure it out.
     
    Last edited: May 11, 2021
  16. Johnr777

    Johnr777 Moderator

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    So he has overlapping physical meshes... that aint too good
     
  17. JrC

    JrC Active Member

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    Yeah... and I wont lie... so does Vancouver. the Road mesh is exactly like what Lilski details as the mesh is in tris and not detailed.
    I could do all the subdivisions and make it better but i would prefer to put that time into getting the Lidar mesh right.
     
  18. JrC

    JrC Active Member

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    the motherload of reference shots..

    it said 2000 but I think that isnt right as this is the pre 98 track

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    The tunnel!

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  19. JrC

    JrC Active Member

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    I can't seem to solve this issue where when the track loads and you go to setup, it doesn't default to the track folder and you have to scroll all the way down to the Vancouverr1998 folder to load your setup...

    Anyone know how to fix that?
     
  20. JrC

    JrC Active Member

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    some background lighting... its killing fps though :lol:

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    just watched a race and i think its actually the shadows doing the damage on the fps... maybe...
     
    Last edited: May 17, 2021
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