MTM2.com

D-2-S you've done it again...

With your permission, I'll be using your new lite textures in all future custom trucks in my livery.

Thanks for the work you have done...



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SMP-Creation's

Actually, we were thinking of this in terms of a permanent 'fix' to the game - mounting it at the top of pod.ini so that the original lite textures are replaced. This way ALL trucks that use the standard litefuzz textures will have their lights modified this way.

I have no problem with you including them with your truck releases, but unless you mount said truck at the top of the pod list the modified textures won't come into play - and if you do put it at the top it will change the lights for all trucks anyway... alternatively, you might give these textures a different name and stipulate that in your .trk file, and then your truck (and only your truck) will have the modified light beams - but then that could throw up an incompatibility (of sorts) with 3Dfx renderers, which already give this effect. Plus it would become redundant if/when this makes it into fixall.pod.

I readily give permission for anyone to use these textures in their trucks, but that would be a method which I personally wouldn't use.

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Please use the brake provided and not the vehicle in front of you.
- V8 Challenge online racing guidelines

I see your point!

I updated my fixall.pod with not only the litefuzz but with the red and blue ones as well and as you indicated, it changed all the lighting affects on all the trucks. I'm working on 4 new trucks now and these will take advantage of the bluefuzz and possibly the redfuzz as well.

Thanks again for your inquiring mind and the work you do to resolve new and innovative ways of making MTM more enjoyable for all of us.



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SMP-Creation's

Ahh... actually, I'm not sure whether I've finished with this yet! I was still investigating neutralising the green tinge in the lights... the four litefuzz variants that I posted here were intended to demonstrate the implications of modifying the textures one way or another. Adding some red to the texture does indeed work very nice at counteracting the green, but then there are problems caused by increasing/decreasing the colour depth (it loses colours, and you end up with colour banding and/or pixelation) in order to add the red to the texture to begin with. I was kind of waiting on feedback to see where to go from here... but if people are happy enough with the present ones (green tinge notwithstanding) then I guess I'll wrap it up...

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Please use the brake provided and not the vehicle in front of you.
- V8 Challenge online racing guidelines

I was messing around with these last night and for whatever reason I cannot see any green or red tinge with any pod variation...

650x1320 jpeg

or

1300x660 jpeg

to me LITES_2.POD offers the most attractive results ...but it got me to thinking last night, why not just eliminate the beams altogether? so I whipped up this LITES_00.POD this morning and not only does it look the most natural but it significantly increases the field of veiw by making the beams completely transparent...
<IMG SRC="http://www.mtmc4fun.com/MTMbbs/lites_00.jpg" border=0>

it's a good thing the SLO people never read this board because this pod would give them an unfair advantage in night time races over the unsuspecting shmucks errr competition ;o)... especialy if any were to use chase far as I do...

chase far comparrison, 720x440 jpeg

the pics don't really reflect the visual difference you'll see in the game but they give you an idea...

Lites_00.zip (1k)

... now as for the red and blue fuzzies obviously this would not be a good idea, but for plain ol' high beams I'm sticking with this.

DANG IT. If i would have known this back in "Mother Nature Revenge" tourney.... where the final was in pitch black on Gallypop (i think that's the name).

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"Every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around" -Penelope Cruz, Vanilla Sky

Mal - yeah, I came across the idea of making the beams transparent myself with the original page while establishing what alterations I needed to make to get the beams to fade at the ends (ie, did TRI made white the most opaque colour, or black). I certainly see some appeal in making the light beams completely transparent, but I decided that since TRI had gone to the trouble of programming light beams into the game, we may as well keep'm. But each to their own...

I use Chase Near mode, with the camera elevated slightly so I can see where I'm going, exclusively (I never found Chase Far to be, ah, intimate enough with the vehicle) and I found the old light beams tended to interfere a lot with my view of the road... but the modified fadey beams take the edge off those hexagonal cones very nicely, and suddenly they don't seem so obstructive. Your Chase Far has a higher angle though, so I can see how removing the beams completely is more to your liking...

As for why you can't see the green tinge with the other litefuzz textures, I don't know but it might be due to the track palette, in which case you can congratulate yourself on being the first to find a track palette that is friendly to these translucent textures... or maybe it's because the track environment is so predominantly green. Hmmm. I know I found the green was most apparent where multiple light beams overlapped - for my examples I used Bigfoot viewed from the side (so the four rooflamps overlap). But even that Crazy 8 truck has four light beams clustered together, so I would have thought it would be readily visible for you...

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Please use the brake provided and not the vehicle in front of you.
- V8 Challenge online racing guidelines

>> the idea of making the beams transparent

Graphic options > hardware options > uncheck headlights > ok > ok

<font size=+1 face=Wingdings>J</font>

>> the green tinge ...

... is in mal's pics too. Had he used full profile bigfoot for his pics it would be more noticable but it's there all the same.

Anyway, if we're done, which is the final good texture set? I want to add the zip to our file downloads.

<center>Graphic options > hardware options > uncheck headlights > ok > ok</center>

i knew that lol

i like the lites2.pods smoothness the best

I've tried something similar, experimenting with new light textures since I read D2S's first post on the subject. I renamed my beam RAW fom LITEFUZZ.RAW to FADEFUZZ.RAW with no problems in 3DX or Direct3D mode. I guess it's OK to include the new beams in a truck POD.

A new FIXALL pod with the older fixall files, D2S's new beams, and the new dirt/smoke textures in one new "FIXALL_2" pod file for distributation to everyone would be best. The older fixall has been around a long time....

I notice the green tinge a lot in my painting projects. it seems the software uses certain green shades as subsitutes for certain grey shades that aren't available....even if I remove all color from the RAW, I wll still see greenish areas while on some custom tracks.

I see more truck-color changes on the converted EVO tracks, due to their unique and detailed colors (converted from 24-bit textures, I imagine).

Oh, and...welcome back Phin....


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-BigDOGGe's Boneyard...The Best Custom Trucks in MTM2 -
http://mtm2.com/~bigdogge/

>> which is the final good texture set?

I like the original lites_1.pod I finished up with in the beginning - being blurred tones down the TV-static patterning of the original litefuzz textures so they look smoother, but still match the red and blue fuzz'z, which I think are alright as is. If we were to go with Mal's choice of lites_2, I'd want to darken them so they're less opaque.

I could add some red to those textures to nullify the green, but I'm concerned about getting weird stuff happening with certain strange track palettes, and having to increase and decrease the colour depth in PSP causes colours to be lost resulting in unwanted colour banding or pixelation (since lites_1 are grey scale, I didn't have to do this to darken/blur them). Oh, instead of sitting here debating whether it'd be worthwhile, I'll just do it and let y'all try it out and decide. Here...

<center><IMG SRC="http://mtm2.com/~d2s/litefuzz/lites_5.gif" border=0>
lites_5.zip</center>

Turned out better than I expected. I used an increment of 4% red, which seems just about right to kill the green, though they may need slight adjusting on the dark end. Anyway, I'd say either lites_1, or these, depending on what we think of the whole green tinge thing.

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Please use the brake provided and not the vehicle in front of you.
- V8 Challenge online racing guidelines

<font size=1>Edited by Drive2Survive (30-12-2002)</font>

I'm curious. Did you do anything to the red and blue fuzzez after I did? or are they the ones you're using now, or something different?

I did not, until now, use the same trick on the litefuzz palette. What I did, now, was take your red layer'd texture and grayscaled it and put in a palette that uses the full range of 256 colors to create a more gradual gradient from light to dark - much the same as I did for the red and blue. Results are here:

http://rhinoseros.com/~pics/ideas/litefuzz/page3.html

(edit. I just learned if you raise the color to 16 million, then apply grayscale you get a nice palette)

I'm satisfied with the red and blue I did, tho I'm open to suggestion. For the litefuzz, I could live with almost any of the better versions we've seen, including your red overlay.

As for fixes, the top of my pod.ini file looks like this.

Fixes\LITES_6.POD
Fixes\MaxsDirtSmoke.pod
Fixes\MTM2MTM2beta.POD
Fixes\FIXALL.POD
Fixes\DriverCheckIn.pod

There is also a fixfixl.pod but I haven't looked into it too deeply tho I suspect it's worth using.

If it's just a matter of merging the lites and dirt to the old fixall, then I wonder if it's worth the fuss of creating a whole new fixall. However, if we were to create a merged version of the best of all these then perhaps we should consider it, but I think we'd want to get ol' wint to add his two cents since he's behind many fixes already.

btw, I use the MTM2MTM2beta.POD rather than v1 because of the water.



<font size=1>Edited by Phineus (31-12-2002)</font>

>> Did you do anything to the red and blue fuzzez after I did?

Nope. You seemed happy with the results you got and to me they seem far too infrequently used to be worth too much effort. The greenish tinge isn't real noticeable with the colours, and in 99.9% of cases, trucks use the plain litefuzz for their lights, so I was only concerned with nailing the main case.

>> I did not, until now, use the same trick on the litefuzz palette.

I've never edited a palette in my life. I just paint in 16-mil colour mode, then drop the colour depth and let the program sort it out. Not the best method for this type of application but it serves for what I normally do.

>> What I did, now, was take your red layer'd texture and grayscaled it and put in a palette that uses the full range of 256 colors to create a more gradual gradient from light to dark

I'm getting confused, but I think you'd want to use the original layer'd texture (most recently seen as lites_1.pod). For working solely in greyscale, you can do things within the constraint of a 256-colour palette as if it were in 16-million colour mode. Hence I didn't need to convert it to 16 million colours, and then suffer colour loss/pixelation when I converted back. I did have to do so for that lites_5, which caused colour loss and pixelation on the texture, but I used dithering when reducing the colours so it's not so obvious.

Hey, the visible differences are absoluetly minimal but I like to be complete.

Oh, I'm reading this to mean that you didn't tweak any red into your palettes, so the texture that was lites_5 is now true greyscale again, like lites_1?

>> http://rhinoseros.com/~pics/ideas/litefuzz/page3.html

I can't see any green tinge in those, but you're driving in Pitch Black, no?

I just had a thought - if you get no green on the lights in Pitch Black, but some in Night, then would you get some more in Dusk or Rain? I'll have to check. If this is the case, then trying to combat the green tint is a bunk effort...

>> If it's just a matter of merging the lites and dirt to the old fixall, then I wonder if it's worth the fuss of creating a whole new fixall. However, if we were to create a merged version of the best of all these then perhaps we should consider it

We should also consider that there is a small proportion of people who use a 3Dfx renderer (ie my old comp and BigDOGGe are two I know), and who might also want to use fixall. For these people the modified light textures aren't worth having. Of course, the proportion of people who lie in that category is probably so small it's not a factor worth considering nowadays...

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Please use the brake provided and not the vehicle in front of you.
- V8 Challenge online racing guidelines

Truck-makers would like to have such an updated Fixall, as I use Direct3D mode a lot to test my trucks....sometimes a truck with a large number of vertices will crash my comp with a TOO MANY VERTICES message, but only in Direct3D mode for some reason. I guess the game can handle more detail in 3DFX mode (hint hint).

Maybe KC should sell VOODOO2 video cards along with the game CDs.....heh heh...



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-BigDOGGe's Boneyard...The Best Custom Trucks in MTM2 -
http://mtm2.com/~bigdogge/

>> I think you'd want to use the original layer'd texture (most recently seen as lites_1.pod).

Upon inspection, there isn't much difference between that one and the one I made.

>> lites_5 is now true greyscale again like lites_1?

Yes. For my experiment lites_6.

>> I can't see any green tinge in those, but you're driving in Pitch Black, no?

It's there. Like mal's pics, it's there. I think the more we stare at it the more forgiving we become, but there's a green tinge in all those pics.

http://rhinoseros.com/~pics/ideas/litefuzz/page4.html

>> Truck-makers would like to have such an updated Fixall

FixMore.pod was created by merging the following fixes

Fixall.pod
MTM2MTM2beta.pod (2000-30-03)
mtm2mtm2.pod (2000-10-18)
mtm2mtm2.pod (2000-12-25)
fixfixall.pod
MaxsDirtSmoke.pod
LITEFZZ2.POD
LITES_6.POD

I worked from the oldest to newest, if there were duplicate files the older ones were replaced (this will be most noticable with the water color, which I feel is improved with the deeper blue color). I also added a couple more fixes, not the least of which was the lasx checkpoints.


edit. Updated and corrected spelling in the readme.txt

one complaint, shoulda called it the phixallagin.pod

good work guys :o) n thanks

Updated : FixMore.pod


<font size=1>Edited by Phineus (24-01-2003)</font>

Cool stuff, nice work guys!


> (Phineus) There is also a fixfixl.pod but I haven't looked into it too deeply tho I suspect it's worth using.

It's not. Details are on the second part of my old <a href=http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Corridor/9018/fixes.htm>fixes</a> page. I made it for myself, way back when I needed it, and included it on that page for kicks, but when I update I'd planned to axe it. Nice work on the merge sequence. I'm downloading now.


> (D2S) I use Chase Near mode, with the camera elevated slightly so I can see where I'm going, exclusively (I never found Chase Far to be, ah, intimate enough with the vehicle)

I use chase far and slightly up most of the time, and cockpit the rest of the, and the "Z" mode blimp and race cams on occasion. When I began playing the game I used your view, then switched to chase far so I could see more track and less truck on the more wild and rugged terrains.

> fixfixl.pod
> when I update I'd planned to axe it.

Welp, it's in there now

I should also add I fixed several billboards so they now have correct addresses on them... and I updated the mtmg model downloads at the same time. Adding these few extra fixes was actually the motivation to rename the zip as Mal suggested.

fixed billboards... clever!