Re: MTM2 Beta Patch 0.50 - Spreadsheet menus begone!

[Fila]

After I get home from work I got no plans for the rest of the day and tomorrow so I should have time to fix all of this. Depending on how long it takes to fix the trucks, that seems to be a major hassle and I might have to give up on isolating the trucks from the track palette.

[Fila]

Hey Fila, with all the work you have done and I know you have been busy. What's the chances we can get the actual count on max values? like triangles/vertices for trucks and textures? I messed with OGRudeE's Blender plugins and testing and importing other model formats. 10,000 triangles work but I tried over 30,000 and it has badmodelmrgl or whatever. Sadly I don't know if this was changed cause while I was working on the blender plugin and testing I updated to .50 so not sure where we are at on new trucks. Thanks.

I'll give you the quick answer first:

Verified numbers:

limit value where
Model format triangle/vertex cap none — vlistStruct.n and all facet indices are 32-bit int 3D.H
Renderer index width 16-bit WORD → 65,535 vertices per draw batch RENDD3D11.CPP:187
Global vertex buffer 120,000 (original was 4,000 — raised in this project) 2d.cpp:43
Renderer vertex buffer 560,000 MAX_VERTEX
Texture/state blocks per model 128 MAX_OBJ_BATCH
Texture cache 512 × 256², 2048 × 64², 64 × 32²; DLL LRU 2048 global.h / rendcomm.h
On their error specifically: "Bad model!" is a header check — it fires only when the file's first opcode isn't MRGL_MAGNIFY (20) or MRGL_KEYFRAME (32). There is no triangle-count check anywhere in the loader. So 30k triangles isn't hitting a documented ceiling; something upstream is producing a file the loader won't accept.

Most likely cause, offered as a hypothesis: the renderers use 16-bit indices, so a single batch can't exceed 65,535 vertices. If the exporter splits vertices per-face for UVs, 30,000 triangles ≈ 90,000 vertices — over the line — while 10,000 ≈ 30,000, comfortably under. That matches their boundary well. It's a hypothesis about their file, not a confirmed diagnosis.


Now for the additional answer: I was actually planning on making a thread about this, hopefully tomorrow, where I want to discuss this very thing together with other models and texture formats and sizes. Because I do want to open up the game to allow to bring in higher detailed models and higher limits. The FPS headroom is there now and I want people to be able to experiment to see what is a happy medium as to be fair, I don't even know how much the engine can handle now after the changes I have made.

[Fila]

what a great job you did with the UI Fila. hats off to you man! Now I can run MTM2 in my M5 Mac with no issues using a Windows 11 ARM VM + DX11 mode. I used to have all kind of resolution issues with the classic menu, now these issues are gone. I haven't tried vulkan mode on my windows machine yet but man, the new UI is amazing! and the free roam mode is great new feature for track makers. Also nice job with the cockpit, it is a very clever solution.

now for the not so pretty stuff. Still, nothing terrible or of big concern to be honest. just graphical nosense probably tied to my weird hw.

Mind you, this is a really odd hardware setup but nevertheless I wanted to share this with you. It is basically just a ton of emulation layers, one on top of the other:
MacOS 26 as host OS, windows 11 ARM as virtualized OS, a VMware virtual GPU translating DX11 calls to apple's metal API which connects to the M5 GPU. truly an amazing piece of engineering isn't it?

Captura de pantalla 2026-07-30 a la(s) 4.29.24 a.m..jpg

-backdrop transparency didn't work
-frame rate limiter didn't work, but interestingly v-sync did
-everytime I changed the camera the track music restarted
-BIN shiny faces are just way too shiny, they make the truck look like if its made of glass. reminds me a lot of midtown madness/MTM64 exaggerated reflections
-I clearly see a loss of detail in the truck bodies. (Truck: BF Power Wheels by rep fan)
-skybox and lens flare effects were pixelated (or did i fail to modify a graphic option?)


also shouldn't we get rid of backdrops at some point? or at least have a way to toggle them off from some tracks, since with the now long draw distance they are redundant. of course this won't look good on some tracks that are mostly flat, but still better than that odd sky-blue gradient of the draw distance limit clashing with the colored backdrops.

the gears, tachometer and speedometer needs a font size increase based on the resolution. right now they are stuck at 640x480. same goes for commentary text box, frame rate display and any captions displayed.

since I had to delete the monster.ini file the following ideas came to mind :
-the graphics options should be set as high quality / complex scenery as default, same for sound quality (44hz + 16 bit), we're not in 1998 anymore, maybe we can keep the more advanced, new stuff at low, but i think a lot of people are going to re-visit the game with this new patch and making things easier for these casual gamers would benefit us.
-remove the 256 colors warning.

and by the way, I had no issues scrolling lists using my trackpad.

Ooof, I don't know what to tell you Kmaster, most of this stuff seems to be due to translation layers. Does vulkan work in this stack you have going on?
One of the things I want to point out, once i release Comm Patch 3, I plan on migrating the builds from an older toolset to the modern toolset. This MIGHT help with your translation layers issues or it might not. I don't want to try and do any changes based on this until I at least do that move.

Frame limiter was not live, needed a restart but I changed that now.
Not sure about getting rid of the backdrops honestly. Think I wanna first increase the limits and see how the engine handles that. If FPS holds steady then I will consider extending the terrain view further and drop the backdrops.

I've done those default changes. Though right now I'm dealing with some unintended consequences but I'll fix those :p

[Fila]

Ohlala! Very interesting graphical issues arise in the menus after changing the resolution in windowed mode! Basically all the the menu art breaks, especially the buttons. I'll post screenshots later if you can't reproduce it. This menu art breakage happened after choosing a resolution above my monitors native resolution. Going down in resolution from native seems to work ok.

Even more, you can access all of the old game menus both in the menus and in the race after changing the resolution while in windowed mode. Doesn't seem to affect fps, but I imagine you don't want it.

Interesting. It was not supposed to allow you to go to a higher resolution than what your native monitor can do.

[Fila]

For the tabs I was thinking of something you would create, they'd be buttons but just look like tabs somewhere near the top of the screen. Think of browser tabs, not the classic windows menu style stuff the game used to have.

I'll take another look for those buttons in the pod. Thanks.

Making a skinnable package for the ui could be fun, obviously an after thought at the moment. Everything works great as is.

I think shockwave asked about the scroll bars, and yes, clicking on them to try scrolling doesn't work for me either.

I didn't want to allow options to be accessible during gameplay because some options are more buggy than others to change during live gameplay. I can add them with the warning that changing some stuff might crash the game :p

Ok, so the scroll thing... is this on steam? Both on the desktop and on the old laptop I can click on the scroll bar and it scrolls to the place where I clicked. Then I can drag and drop it too using the mouse.

For controllers, I've been using your xinput with separate gas and brake axes, gas on Rx and brake on Z, and braking while holding down the gas doesn't seem to do anything. Also, Y seems to still be locked to gas with this config, so with no buttons pressed, the truck keeps accelerating (and yes, auto accel is off in the menu). After testing, the correct settings on xinput seem to be X axis for steering, Y for gas / brake, then the triggers work automatically with correct behavior, same as the original game setup.

I also tried the Xbox one controller option just now to see if rumble works there, and the invert pedals button doesn't seem to do anything that I can tell. So, gas and brake are inverted from what I like with no way to change / fix.

Just found the track flyby menu! Reminds me of the old maze screensavers. Also, I didn't need to restart for it to take effect. Showed up in 3 or so seconds. I did need to restart to go back to the static menu. Went back because at the moment the whole menu pauses while it loads the shadows for the flyby, and I'm too impatient for that.

Windowed mode (F4) looks very nice! Sadly though, the window was not maximized, and it is not resizable. I think it defaulted to 720p or 900p on Dx11.

So with the work in regards to the input, I have to rely completely on the AI for this one because I got eff all clue what I am looking at. So the AI mentioned this.

The third one I've left alone, because it's a behaviour decision rather than a bug. pitchMove = _brake - _gas deliberately folds both pedals onto the single axis the sim consumes; there's no separate brake channel to plumb into. The cheap fix is to make brake dominate — if the brake is past the deadzone, ignore the gas — which would make "brake while holding gas" behave as expected without touching Sim.cpp. But it changes how every separate-pedal setup drives, including wheels that currently work, so I'd rather you decide. Say the word and it's a couple of lines.

One thing worth having your tester confirm: which entry they selected. A pad usually enumerates twice, and "gas on Rx, brake on Z" only makes sense on the DirectInput entry — where an Xbox pad's triggers are combined on Z and Rx is the right stick resting at centre, read as permanent half-throttle. If that's what happened, the runaway acceleration is fully explained and the new UI prevents the whole class of mistake. If they were on the XInput entry, then something else is going on and I'd want to know.

[Fila]

Still getting the crash log error message every time I close, turns out it's a Vulkan thing whereas DX11 doesn't produce it every time I close.

By the way, I have yet to voice my thoughts on this beta yet! So here it goes...

This a big update indeed! Menus and such, I'm lovin' it ever than before. Also, I love how you bought the Chase Mirror in, if not for the fact that it's too big on the length of height side of things to where it can block my top view of overhead things at times, like the Drag christmas trees at J Drags, so you'll might want to make it a bit more skinnier, Assetto Corsa's Chase Mirror would be a prime example of it.



Also, the "Hear Commentary" box has all but disappeared from the Game options menu, which I've only ever been having it off so that I don't have to cringe at addon trucks having some WAV file of either the Stock, or some custom made WAV file made for the addon truck which clashes with Army Armstrong voice to the point of cringe. That's my opinion at least.

Having Sonic Trucks be toggled on/off in the Races menu as opposed to the Options menu would be better, from jumping between Circuits/Rallies to Drags.

Oh I missed the hear commentary button. Sorry, did all of this.

Can you post the crash.log again with this new version that you're running?

[Fila]

Buzzard Country by Malibu: I turned the music down to 70 because it's so dern much louder than everything, and when the track repeats, it's back to full volume.

Hmmm, does it happen on other tracks too? I tried replicating on my end and haven't had this change in sound. The AI cannot find anything either.
Actually, wait until i release the hotfix. I DID some work on the sound prior to this, I may or may not inadvertently fixed it.

[Fila]

https://www.mtm2.com/~mtmg/misc/Beta0.50hotfix2.zip

So hotfix2.... is not really a hotfix but more of a full blown patch. lol

I pretty much addressed all the points in this topic except for two:
- Shockwaves Steam issues (the manual and the heights water see through). I'm hoping to get my steam up and running tomorrow and see if I can replicate.

Otherwise, I have also done a host of small tweaks that were not mentioned by anyone. They are like companion pieces to the work that I've been doing. And to show the advantage of the new menu, go into Options>Game and see the new options for the Yeehaww/Horn sounds ;) To implement these changes in the old menus would have been a major pain.

Rudee
- I have fixed the menu_layout dump. The only caveat is you need to redo the opening every single menu page but it works now.
- I have also tried working on the gamepad issues. Let me know if there is any improvement since I am doing this blind. Also AI says rumble should be working.
- Check to see if you still have the buzzard sound issue

The big work was fixing those darn trucks. The whole color rendering had to be rewritten and additionally, I've extended this to the tracks too. So now both tracks and trucks still use the original palette but they immediately convert it to true color and by the time you get to see the images, there is no more palette being rendered. So trucks now always display correct, tracks always display based on their true textures and there is zero interaction between the two. The caveat with this is that if someone made some weird palettes for certain tracks on purpose, such as to change the color of the water, those are now gone as everything renders in their true texture color.

The max fps limiter now works live, you don't need to restart the game anymore for it to kick in. Note, the menus have vsync running automatically because otherwise it will maximize your video card for no reason running at 2000fps.

[Jpez1432]

Hey Fila, with all the work you have done and I know you have been busy. What's the chances we can get the actual count on max values? like triangles/vertices for trucks and textures? I messed with OGRudeE's Blender plugins and testing and importing other model formats. 10,000 triangles work but I tried over 30,000 and it has badmodelmrgl or whatever. Sadly I don't know if this was changed cause while I was working on the blender plugin and testing I updated to .50 so not sure where we are at on new trucks. Thanks.

I'll give you the quick answer first:

Verified numbers:

limit value where
Model format triangle/vertex cap none — vlistStruct.n and all facet indices are 32-bit int 3D.H
Renderer index width 16-bit WORD → 65,535 vertices per draw batch RENDD3D11.CPP:187
Global vertex buffer 120,000 (original was 4,000 — raised in this project) 2d.cpp:43
Renderer vertex buffer 560,000 MAX_VERTEX
Texture/state blocks per model 128 MAX_OBJ_BATCH
Texture cache 512 × 256², 2048 × 64², 64 × 32²; DLL LRU 2048 global.h / rendcomm.h
On their error specifically: "Bad model!" is a header check — it fires only when the file's first opcode isn't MRGL_MAGNIFY (20) or MRGL_KEYFRAME (32). There is no triangle-count check anywhere in the loader. So 30k triangles isn't hitting a documented ceiling; something upstream is producing a file the loader won't accept.

Most likely cause, offered as a hypothesis: the renderers use 16-bit indices, so a single batch can't exceed 65,535 vertices. If the exporter splits vertices per-face for UVs, 30,000 triangles ≈ 90,000 vertices — over the line — while 10,000 ≈ 30,000, comfortably under. That matches their boundary well. It's a hypothesis about their file, not a confirmed diagnosis.


Now for the additional answer: I was actually planning on making a thread about this, hopefully tomorrow, where I want to discuss this very thing together with other models and texture formats and sizes. Because I do want to open up the game to allow to bring in higher detailed models and higher limits. The FPS headroom is there now and I want people to be able to experiment to see what is a happy medium as to be fair, I don't even know how much the engine can handle now after the changes I have made.

Hey Fila, thanks for the quick reply. I've updated the blender plugin again and installed the new patch. Haven't tried it just woke up. Gonna post it later if I get it working again, models load fine into BinEdit and if I load and instantly save they work in MTM2? Odd behavior, something isn't being wrote correctly in the plugin. Anyways, on regards to the upgrading the models and/or textures. I started to mention this the other day but didn't. This is my take on it, glb models are single binary files with all model data, pbr materials that can either be compiled with pngs or jpgs for smaller size, this could be so easily implemented (I would think), recommend cgltf library. The game would simply look for the bin models counterpart, load the glb extension if found and it loads, if not it falls back to bin. No need to upgrade the texture loading. If you wanted to make another texture format available. I would recommend png for obvious reasons (lossless compression) and simply either look for those instead of raw/act, or I can make the blender plugin easily write png as the extension in the bin instead of raw but than it wouldn't be backwards compatiable. Just some thoughts.

[Shockwave_S08]

Some feedback with Hotfix 2:

• "Yeehaww" in game options needs to be grammar-corrected to "Yee-Haw", for consistency with input rebind menus.

• XInput controls are missing options for Right Stick (Ry/Rz, perhaps tie to camera control?), LS and RS Clicks, and individual D-Pad directions. Controller rumble also seems to have stopped functioning in Hotfix 2.

• Rear-view mirror is missing from both input rebind menus.

• The red and green lights on vanilla MTM1 and MTM2 starting lines fail to display at all, instead rendering as pitch-black; pictures attached. Staging lights in drag races still work, though.

• Rear-view mirror overlaps the mid-race pause/options menus; picture attached.

20260802085458_1.jpg

20260802085535_1.jpg

20260802085602_1.jpg

20260802090659_1.jpg

[Bjcon215]

Controller rumble is working for me. I’ve only done a quick test, but everything seems to be working fine so far.

[OG_RuDeE]

-Sound issue seems fixed.
-xBox controller is working fine with new updates. Sorry, I forgot to tell you it seemed to be working fine yesterday too.
-Rumble has never worked on my xBox controllers in MTM2. Tried two different controllers this morning, one Power A usb wired xbox controller and the other the xbox elite 2. An aside, strangely elite 2's dpad works in menus sans Steam but not the Power A (fix is low priority for me). Oh, and controllers now work sans steam on all my machines, yay!
-Can confirm loading new menu_layout.txt doesn't kill text. I need to play with it more to say more.

[Fila]

This is great. I have the following situations

- rumble went from working to not working for 1 person
- rumble still working for 1 person
- rumble never worked for 1 person

Only missing the rumble going from not working to working. Haha, this is definitely gonna be a blind attempt at fixing things ^_^

[Fila]

i might have found the regression between why the rumble stopped working for shockwave and not for bjcon (dumb luck it's working for bjcon, lol)

Shockwave:

Right stick (Rx/Ry) for camera is a genuine feature, not a gap — there's no camera-look axis in the engine to bind it to, so it needs a design decision about what it should drive before any code. Worth treating as its own item.

So I could in theory make it so that you can freely move the camera around, would that work?

Rudee:

The third tester, whose rumble never worked on either version, isn't explained by any of this. That's a different problem — most likely his pad enumerating as DirectInput rather than XInput, in which case he'd be getting wheel-style FFB on a device that can't do it. If he can tell you what the Input Device dropdown names his controller, that would settle it.

[Shockwave_S08]

Shockwave:

Right stick (Rx/Ry) for camera is a genuine feature, not a gap — there's no camera-look axis in the engine to bind it to, so it needs a design decision about what it should drive before any code. Worth treating as its own item.

So I could in theory make it so that you can freely move the camera around, would that work?

That would be perfect! Most modern racing games use the right stick for swiveling the camera around anyway.

[OG_RuDeE]

D-Pad swivels the camera right now somewhat. On games like wreckfest you use the right stack to look left. Look right. Look back. It would be cool to have those views in mtm2 too.

Fila, I will tell you what comes up for my controller when I get back home, but I think it was x input.

Separately, steering while playing on wheel isn't sensitive enough for me. I have to turn the wheel 90° before I get any kind of movement. I have sensitivity turned all the way up and dead zone to zero.

[Fila]

Interesting, that is not my experience on my wheel at all. I actually increased my dead zone. Does your wheel have any sensitivity settings in its own software?

[OG_RuDeE]

My Wheel did not come with any software. It's just the cheapo thrustmaster t98 or whatever. It works well in Evo 2. I tested it today and in wreckfast 2, there are additional settings in that game that make it really nice.

[Fila]

Oh yeah, game loads much easier on steam deck now. I still have to toy with the button bindings and see if i need to tweak anything but game mostly runs off the bat. Need to fix it defaulting to triglide.dll and killing the initial boot though.

Shockwave
I was able to at least test The Heights using Vulkan as a renderer and I had no water bug

[Ford-chan]

Can you post the crash.log again with this new version that you're running?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rSZQlx ... sp=sharing

By the way, Hotfix 2 is proving heaps better this time round, the only thing I've noticed so far in regards to the palette rewrite is how the Drag christmas lights have a slight different tannish orange on the Prestage/Stage lights, not that I'm all too concerned about it, at least it's still orange colour.

The Pause Menu Options when selecting different options don't seem to work, clicking on an option doesn't open up the options box for each individual option. For e.g, selecting "Sound Device" in the Pause Race Options doesn't open up a box other than the arrows pointing up or down upon clicking.