Test Track Update.
 27th August  2002
 
Work is progressing very nicely on the test track, although not without its share of interuptions.  
 
   
 
This time the image is from work I am doing on the pit lane. It is fairly obvious that there is still a lot to do here but it should give you an idea. It is currently little more than a test bed of ideas, with various objects simply placed in the scene to check continuity.  
 

   
 
As you can see I have opted for an older style of pit to be in keeping with the nature of the track. You can also see that we have a name in mind for the test track, Westlake! Comments in writing to...  
 
 
 
We received a visit during the week from 3 well known characters in the GPL community, Marc Mercer, Martijn Taffer and Fred Nornemark,  and we discussed at length what, in their minds, makes a good track and, along with the suggestions on the forum, I think the track should be great fun to drive when finished. I don't think there is a chance that it will be perfect first time but we can work on it. (You might like to know that I am making notes as I create this track to be used later in a track creating tutorial.)
 

 
I have, at present, moved on to trackside objects and texture creation, which I just love, and when I have boosted my library of these I shall return to the track itself. Above you can see one of these objects taking shape. This is going to be the roof of a temporary grandstand. I plan on making this library available to everyone eventually to help make it easier to design tracks for Racing Legends, especially for those of you who are not of an artistic nature. They will also be useful for the more experienced track creators to get an idea for 'polycount' and the detail involved, it should, at the very least, make prototyping tracks a lot quicker.  
Please keep the comments and suggestions coming.
 
Please note. Any company names or logos that may appear in these images are temporary and are used as fillers until such time as we receive permission to use them. There inclusion should not be interpreted as an endorsement by these companies of Racing Legends.

We aren't ready to release game shots yet. The pics so far have just been to show what is being worked on as people wanted to see something. It wasnt meant as a 'look at this isnt it wonderful' pr thing, just as an interest item for anyone interested.
 
More information will come when its ready, but there is no point in releasing shots from an engine that we arnt 100% happy with, as Iam quite sure if we did we would have to deal with a lot of negative feedback.
 
C&T

The pack at Goodwood was made to be given to car owners, teams and drivers, it contained some information that we just arnt ready yet for other dev teams out there to see, so we requested that it wasnt posted anywhere.
 
We have had a very long friendship and working partnership with the guys at Hyper and they asked if they could make use of a couple of the pics. Which we were happy to do as they wernt the pics we are keen to protect at the moment.
 
Hope that helps.
 
C&T

Yes that pic is a render, it makes use of 3 lights to get a more even lighting to it. Though the aim of the engine is to take anything output by max and recreate it in real time which it pretty much does currently, and the results are about 90% of what can be seen in a render, and this will get better as we add for vertex and pixel shaders. That renders are done using the max scaline renderer. But they are low poly game objects.
 
C&T

Yes we are monitoring everything. The fact is we just arnt prepared to release hundreds of screenshots every week, there is still a very long way to go in development and currently we are a little wary of releasing too much info too soon. We are a very small team and we are very awear that big teams can act quicker than we can, so we are being cagey about showing screenshots that show of some of the more novel features of the engine.
 
Plus the updates are only meant as a news bite, when things are right for a proper release of pr type info (ie nearer beta time) then there will be a lot more shots and videos.
 
Hope that helps. Sorry.

Not too keen to have damage to people in the sim, its not really something thats needed.

Hi All
 
When we are closer to beta testing we will post how to go about getting envolved, and what kind fo hardware will be required etc. I can say that beta testers will require more high end equipment than the final product due ti the nature of betas things are usually unoptimised.
 
As for a date, really cant say, it really is a case of when its ready, putting a date on it now will just serve to compromise what we want to achieve, so Iam afraid anyone expecting a beta in the coming weeks will be let down. But its important that anything we release represents the end quality. Especially with other excellent teams like the Live for Speed and Ruud working hard out there to put us out of business  
 
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I think there are 3 subjects here, back face culling, frustum culling, and occlusion.
 
Backface culling is a simple trivial thing for the hardware to do and is not a problem, and usually removes around 40% of the polys you send down the pipe. Frustum culling is what we use int he engine, and using a variation on the quadtree alogorithm, so only the objects that actually lay within sight of the camera are processed and sent to the 3d card, again standard stuff.
 
Occlusion culling is another system where you try and render objects front to back (which you should do anyway to save redraw) and as you draw an object you keep track of the area behind that it blocks of then you can check the next object against those volumes to see if they are visible. This until now has been a software thing, but the new cards do have it in hardware to a degree. Its useful to a degree, but racing games by nature do tend to be very open and not often does a case of occlusion happen. But we are still testing that one.
 
There is another system especially for the cars that means although the cars are detailed not all the detailed is processed, for example if the bonnet is closed you dont need to process the engine detail etc.
 
Hope that helps.
 
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Those are the kind of details we are very keen to get in, adds to the feeling of immersion no end.
 
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Yep E-Cards are just CD's with the 'corners' cut off. They hold about 35Mb of data. Though items will be available on normal CD as well.
 
C&T