Hello community! I've finally reached a stage where I am confident to share my work with you all: https://www.racedepartment.com/downloads/sepang-trees-and-facelift-extension.46808/ https://www.racedepartment.com/downloads/indianapolis-gp-facelift-extension.46908/ Many thanks for your help on this forum. I would appreciate further feedback, as I feel I am far from being proficient with the tools. Moreover, as a community, I feel that doing facelifts is relatively low effort (vs. from-scratch builds!) and can improve the game a lot. Not to mention that most great tracks are already in AC! Suggestions what and how can be improved are very welcome, as well as suggestions for tracks that should be facelifted. VladK aka BoBaHK
Your work looks good! My only argument to facelifts in general... is that they are always done on content that is ripped from other games. Both of your projects are an example of that. It encourages these illegal conversions to become even more popular, get more downloads, and go around Race Department rules by "not sharing the actual track loophole" ... Anyways, my 2 cents
I agree with your sentiment re: ports. As a matter of fact, one of my current WIP projects is to facelift a paid-for track, so that the original track is required (needs to be bought). This will, no doubt, open another set of questions - should paid-for content be kept up-to-date and should the community invest the time to make paid-for mods better? In the case of skins for RSS and VRC cars - the answer is a clear yes. Another WIP project is a facelift (or rebuild?) for on the community track that is not a port (afaik). There are also Kunos tracks that can benefit from tree replacements and some texture upgrading like your own amazing Spa remaster! Ultimately, all creative work is based on previous work and I see too much time is being spent on "from scratch" projects done by a single person that got abandoned along the way without enough collaboration to take them to the next level. So maybe facelift concept can be generalised into Open Source-like collaboration efforts. e.g. how can I rotate that Y-tree not to face the car face-on in one the legit community tracks without - offending the original author - not create too many duplicates of the same track - make it easy for the regular sim-racer to find the latest version and just play, instead of messing around with multiple extensions.
Its a great idea, lots of tracks out there with good bones that could use some extra attention and could easily become quality mods.
