Re: Re: MTM2 Beta Patch 0.51 - We've got x64... and then some

[Fila]

Nothing. BinEdit was inverting the normals due to a bug.


But if you are saying that you did not use BinEdit... then the converter is inverting the normals and i forcefully made BinEdit fix them

[OG_RuDeE]

Yes, after saving with your new BE, the bed texture is noticeably bumpier now!

Screenshot 2026-08-23 210123.jpg

Which direction was inverted? Was it only for 0x18 face type?

[Ford-chan]

Ford Chan, for your pixelated stuff. Turn on smoothing in graphics>hardware

Hmm? My Smoothing setting has always been turned on, even before hotfix5, unless I have to somehow turn it on and off in attempt to somehow rectify the issue? We'll see after some play time with hotfix6.

[Ford-chan]

So, I went and recorded two demo videos of this pixelated fuzziness going with the 3D Truck Viewer, the first being how if you were to start a race without finishing it, the quit race, the bug never shows itself to which I haven't seen till now. The second video is what would to happen if I were to do a race, finish it, then head to the Driver Check-In menu, is when the visual bug shows itself. Hopefully I didn't butcher too much with how the second video will show a brief look at the bug, then jump straight out afterwards.

Also, for some reason, audio works perfectly fine whilst in game, only once I record a video with NVIDIA's Geforce interface program, then playback after recording, is when you'll notice how the audio sounds a little distorted, which I'm only guessing is what Shockwave was referring to in his experience with the game.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/185JWJp ... sp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eEVBX6 ... sp=sharing

[Fila]

Only the 0x18 face type yes. Claude said it was reading them flat.

Facet normals: read flat. Literally a,b,c = 0,0,0 on 1764 of 1765 facets. Nothing to invert — there was no direction stored at all. The engine's FLAT path reads that straight into the GPU normal with no validity check, which is why the bed's relief died.

Vertex normals: neither flat nor inverted. They're perfectly well-formed — every one exactly unit length (65535) — and coherent. They just point along the wrong axis. For the 27 interior bed vertices:

mean |nx| = 0.042 mean |ny| = 0.057 mean |nz| = 0.995

The bed is horizontal, so geometry says every one of those should be (0, +1, 0). Instead the vertical component sits in Z:

vert 89 ( 0, -5100, 65336) -> ( 0.000, -0.078, 0.997)
vert 90 ( 0, -9234, 64881) -> ( 0.000, -0.141, 0.990)
vert 652 (-3447, 0, 65444) -> (-0.053, 0.000, 0.999)

That's a Y/Z swap — the ILIST is in a Z-up frame while the vertex positions are Y-up. An inverted normal would still have |ny| ≈ 1.0 with the sign flipped; these have |ny| ≈ 0.06, i.e. perpendicular. That's why it read as "sideways" earlier.

Ford-chan - i found the bug. It was smoothing, it was getting secretly disabled.

[Ford-chan]

Ha! Even when it's turned on! XD

[Ford-chan]

Feedback part six...

- Those Drag player and opponents times dashboard is one thing, but the added RT as well is just genius!

- This has been a problem on my end for a little while, and I don't know if it's related to my gamepad, but at times, the RS stick that pans the camera will just all of the sudden move on it's own without my command, heck, there would be times where my right thumb would be so close next to the RS stick that I would accidently bump it on certain occasions, an option "RS Pans Camera" where you can simply turn it on/off would do wonders for this problem, and maybe even a button to "Disable Camera Panning" would do wonders too, in this case, I would bind it to "RS Click" once I've got the pitch of the camera on the Chase Camera in the desired spot I want it on.

- Most, if not every time, the first round of a Drag Weekend, the finished time on that round will not carry over to the next round, so you'll end up with some different finishing time which will effectively rob you of lane choice.


- Split Screen works, albeit with some finicky issues...
1. Split Screen kills off the Speedometer/Gears dashboard once you start your own round.
2. Toggling on Split Screen, you basically have to Change Truck Camera for the other half of screen, not to mention how both screens at times can go back to front out of their respective lanes.
3. External Mirror is on during Split Screen.


It's just about getting there, and heck, I'll probably run some of this down over to the Beam/Rigs community and other Monster Truck related places once something like Comm Patch #3 is out, hopefully I'll single-handedly instigate a surge of new people here.

[Fila]

Oh the lane choice is a logic issue on my part. I made it based on the seed number which is purely on qualifying.

[Shockwave_S08]

Found a bug with FMV playback: If opening a video file in any other scenario than finishing a race, the menu music will still play, drowning out the audio.

Also, how do the rest of you wind up with smooth italic fonts in your respective installs?

[OG_RuDeE]

Played with the monster.ini, and I think normalStrength=110 and normalSpecular=10 looks good. It's a bit weak on the tires, but plenty for the bed cover. One can play with the normal map from there to adjust the bumpiness there once something's set, but I think we don't want 0x18 too shiny, hence the value of 10.

Edit: Tires look better with normalSpecular=20 and normalStrength=150. I can mess more with the normal map of the truck at those settings to make the bed cover look right to me. So, see what you think.

[Legend_Of_Wii]

It's just about getting there, and heck, I'll probably run some of this down over to the Beam/Rigs community and other Monster Truck related places once something like Comm Patch #3 is out, hopefully I'll single-handedly instigate a surge of new people here.

I shall do the same!
I am not on those yet, BUT, I will do that soon so I can join you on getting new people here too.

[Legend_Of_Wii]

I am beyond impressed so far!
Great stuff Fila. I was looking at the recent screenshots on this page. Wow...

[Fila]

Found a bug with FMV playback: If opening a video file in any other scenario than finishing a race, the menu music will still play, drowning out the audio.

Also, how do the rest of you wind up with smooth italic fonts in your respective installs?

Honestly... I've been wondering the same and I'm coding this thing

[Fila]

https://www.mtm2.com/~mtmg/misc/Beta0.51_hotfix7.zip
https://www.mtm2.com/~mtmg/misc/Beta0.5 ... _drags.zip

- fixed smoothing secretly turning itself off in Dx11
- in controls I added an option for D-Pan Pans Camera. By default its on, you can toggle it off. Mostly aimed at Ford-Chan. Also, if you go into binding keyboard/buttons there is now a "Toggle Camera Panning" which, presumably, turns this botton on/off during a race
- removed mirror from splitscreen
- made it so that dashboard is preserved after a split screen race finishes
- fixed background music playing over the FMV when watching it in the gallery/manual
- the game will now remember your camera positions, permanently. Between sessions too. If you want to reset to original view, you have to go in keyboard bindings/button bindings and assign a button to reset the option. I did not offer one by default because things are getting crowded and just want to let people to decide what works best for them.
- Army Armstrong seems to have remembered some dialogue he has long forgotten about
- the fixed drags zip is the game.pod from original MTM1. I have gone through the drags to fix the car placements and the course lines so that the AI does not hang/nor run over lines anymore. Otherwise I left it untouched.
- added Rudee's request

0x18 flat faces: completely untouched, and not by a gate I wrote — the VS only produces a specular term on shiny facets, so on a flat one the subtraction is p.spec * alpha where p.spec is zero. Nothing to get wrong.
0x29: alpha 0 = today's highlight, 255 = flat like a 0x18, shades ramp between.
Bumpiness independent of alpha — the normal consumes .rgb before the mask touches .a.

[OG_RuDeE]

Thank you Fila!

Did you end up hard coding the alphaSpec and alphaStrength values, or can they still be adjusted in the monster.ini?

[OG_RuDeE]

Here is Cale's Dreadnaught truck with a normal map. The bed is bumpy, but still shiny. I was thinking maybe you (or I) could have the values flipped, but the windows are shiny too. If you look at the alpha in gimp, for example, the bed is fully white, and windows darkest of all.

DNSS3_N.PNG

Screenshot 2026-08-24 174838.jpg

[Shockwave_S08]

Feedback regarding Hotfix 7:

• The restored Army Armstrong commentary has really livened up the races; he even has race-start comments for certain vanilla MTM2 tracks, and the final-lap notification is a massive help. And who can say no to opening up a big 'ol can of whoop-ass on the competition?

• The addition of the AI Speed slider was sorely needed, as I was absolutely steamrolling the game in the past. Most of the time, the 2nd and 3rd place drivers did a mostly-competent job of keeping pace with me at 110% speed, though all of them still struggle with tighter turns and narrower spaces.

• Regarding the in-game version of the Monster Manual, all of the pages in the Windows Troubleshooting category cannot be opened for some reason.

• Racing line doesn't seem to work on my end.

• As for the level-cache feature, I've got two questions: Will there be a way to manually cap/uncap the amount of storage space used, and would there be a button one can press to automatically build the cache for everything in the current pod.ini load order?

• There ought to be an option to mark the vanilla tracks from both games in the Races menu, like (MTM1) and (MTM2).

• Any possibility of adding true surround-sound support in the future, as well as HTRF for headphone users?

[Fila]

Feedback regarding Hotfix 7:

• Racing line doesn't seem to work on my end.

But the lines in a mtm1 drag work?


@Rudee: lol i kept wondering why it didn't work. It turns out, the shiny that you see is not actually the shiny per se, it's the reflection itself which takes a different code path than the rest of the shiny code and that was never killed. So the reflection still saw "oh, regular shiny face, lemme reflect". fixed now.

[OG_RuDeE]

Ok Cool. Back to work tomorrow. I'll see if I can fire it up in the morning or else I'll check it out in the afternoon. Thanks Fila!

Also great feedback, Shockwave. I got to do a few races and loved all the new army Armstrong commentary. I didn't even realize there was an AI slider now. Looking forward to checking that out!

[Fila]

The slider only partially helps in races because the underlying problem with the AI is are the turns and lack of situational awareness. Which is what the big task will be after Comm Patch 3. But it does help in more simpler tracks and definitely makes fine-tuning drags much easier to have it around your skill level.