Anyway, this patch is actually another massive patch and it's coming with its own eco system. So please bear with me as I will first post the threads and then slowly upload the links as I need to take this one step at a time. For someone that just races the game... well... nothing really has changed. The key word here is "no news is good news". Underneath there has been a massive change bringing it to 64bit, increasing all the limits and what else but if the game looks the same as before it means it is working correct. If something is amiss, that is broken and I will need to fix it. So let me try to separate what this update does:
.50 fixes:
- i have did further work on the dpad quality of life. Initially i wanted to test these myself on the steam deck but... i'm not going to lie, due to this getting pushed back due to the events, I wasn't in the mood anymore and will have you guys suffer first :p
But basically every screen will now have a button highlighted, it might not be the ones you find the easiest so we can still work on it. Hopefully the LB/RB thing works. I made it so that supposedly you can go between driver checkin, race screen, garage using LB/RB but haven't tested. Likewise in the options menu you should be able to switch between the 4 main tabs.
- Added an "Are you sure?" yes/no prompt when selecting Restart Race from the pause menu
- In the Races menu, fixed the text of the Randomize button
- fixed dpad buttons to not change camera when in pause menu
- fixed f4 in pause menu
- attempted to fix Ford Chan's flying planes. Hopefully this doesn't break other models, so it's something to be tested over time.
- when interacting with a dropdown menu on pad, it would be nice to be able to click A to open it, then be able to scroll through it normally with dpad / stick. After landing on your choice, pressing A again should close the dropdown.
- fixed A button behaviour leaking into the race start
- Increased pod limit to 499... good luck out there! Don't blame me when pods corrupt other pods ;)
- temporary fix for AI trucks in J drags (it's a cheat fix, hence temporary)
- overall menu scaler. I like mine at 72% on 1440p screens.
- Arizona's purple texture
- going to start properly tracking versions now ingame as well
Not fixed:
- still hunting this one too: There's some weird steering reversal bug that I've only ever encountered on the J Drags just before hitting the second jump in the outside part of the course on random occasions, with the Xbox Controller XInput running.
- I can share screen shots if needed, but it seems that headlights can cause a bug that scrambles the landscape during replays. Textures wind up in all the wrong places. Might just be the limitations of my system, but it could be worth looking into.
I thought i can replicate it but i cannot. Also i did do a lot of work in this 64bit transition so i might have fixed it by mistake?
I really wanted to test the gamepads myself to make sure I am not releasing something broken (testing with steam deck) but I am simply running out of time and the next two days are busy so I would like to just release it now and deal with the aftermath later ;)
A quick feature that I added:
- in options>game there is now a racing line to help Ford-chan. Work in progress but good enough for now ;)
Technical aspects:
- game now runs in 64bit executable
- has support for .png and .tga files
- i have decided against adding support for any other model objects. If we get the .bin models to export/import with blender correctly there's not really much reason to add support for others. Unless people really really think we need to
- increased a bunch of limits (look into the authoring links that I will put up for info about limits)
- increased the filename limits. However, as a general rule, please STICK TO 18 CHARACTERS MAX (without counting the extension). You can go higher but depending on the context (if it's in the art folder or models folder) it takes various lengths. 18 max is a safe universal rule that also supports the normal mapping texture. Except for animation textures. Those, for a few other reasons that there's no reason to explain, are hardcoded to the old engine standards, so the filename cannot be longer than 11 (11 characters + the extension which results in 14 characters in total). BinEdit and Traxx 1.6.2 already enforce this.
- as a general rule, you can freely add .png/.tga files to the art folder and it will overrule the original .raw/.act files without deleting them. Which means that you can make the game HD without changing a single object. Furthermore, you can release a POD file that you mount in pod.ini to give MTM2 a big HD conversion. The reason is simple, I made it in the code that if the game finds a .png file with the same name as the .raw/act file it should consider that it is the same texture but in HD format, so it will load that texture first and raw/act is the fallback. Any existing track/model/background/sky can be upgraded to HD this way.
- speaking of skies, if you create a WeatherArt folder and place your own sky .png/.tga files in there, they will take priority and show up in your game. The hard rule about this is that it needs to have the same names as the existing sky textures.
- normal mapping is done through .png files only. so if you have example.raw or example.png and add example_N.png, that is the normal mapping texture and the game will treat it as such. This is hardcoded, if you do not give it the _N.png it will not load as a normal mapping. And there's some good news and bad news. Normal mapping can be added to any pre-existing truck, even the .raw/act ones. For terrain, you can only add if you use HD textures first. So you need to use a .png/.tga file to be able to pair it with a _N.png texture. The reason for this is that normal mapping was not planned and the whole rendering engine was built a specific way. It is too much work to have to redo everything, it would touch the shadows again and I simply don't want to do it ;) The other good news is, if you just release a .pod file to update your terrain to HD, you just add the normal mapping texture alongside it and it will work!
Track Making specific:
- the game now has a few additional object properties.
- Train works as before but should now be used for actual trains only. It comes with the sound and the headlight.
- Moving is the same as the train but it strips away the train sounds and the headlight. So generally, add anything that is moving to this instead of train.
- Light, the game now supports adding static lights. No more workaround involving trains. And there are various options you can chose from, the length of the cone, how intense the lighting is and even the colour of the cone. Go nuts. Can be paired with any object but obviously to make it look good, you want to add this to an object that looks like a flashlight or something. Traxx will now show you a nice helper arrow to see which direction the light cone is pointing at and how wide the lighting on the ground is.
Truck/Object making specific:
- Added the transparent/reflection glass. Originally talked about as shiny/transparent texture, the end result is that this is not a new texture type. From now on, this is seen as a material which can be added to any pre-existing face. So you can load a truck and just throw the material setting on the existing texture and voilla, you end up with glass. Magic i tell you. There is a Glass Preset button, please use the glass preset only. You are free to play around with the parameters to get it to look to your liking but do not touch any of the flags.
- Likewise, using the same concept there is a "foliage preset", which basically is an attempt to simulate translucent leaves. You select which faces you want to be translucent, select the foliage preset and then play around with the parameters, leaving the flags untouched.
The reason you must leave the flags untouched is because the updated game engine orders the models into certain caches for performance reasons. There's a static cache which is the fastest, a mid tier cache which is for moving objects including trucks which is semi-fast and a "per frame" drawing. If you play around with the flags, the game engine will not recognize the face and move the whole object to a "per frame" drawing and too many of these objects and it will kill the fps. Per frame hits FPS very hard.
Likewise, you CAN add glass material to static models if you want to make them look nicer but you have to understand the cost. Almost all static models are in the static cache (fastest), adding a glass material to them will move them to the mid tier. Again, too many of these and performance will start hurting. This is another thing where a way to fix this would involve a complete rewrite of the rendering engine and I just don't want to. If you really want to add fancy uses of glass to static models, use different scenery levels to allow people to use them or not if they have a strong system.
Overall utility:
C-POD26 1.0.1 - forum discussion and download link here
- I have remade c-pod and renamed it as c-pod26 and currently sits at version 1.0.1
This will probably become essential at dealing with all the new updates as c-pod26 is aware of all of them.
Traxx 1.6.2 - forum discussion and download link here
- Traxx has been fixed, no more crashes and has been updated to 1.6.2
- it is HD aware and it allows you the option, when importing HD textures, to create raw/act as a fallback. Then when you save the pod it asks you if you want to save the .pod with the raw/act fallback or just the HD textures. The reason for the fallback, if you want to make it legacy compatible but honestly, I strongly feel that people should be moving to the updated engine instead.
- You can set it as preference that when importing HD textures, it does NOT create additional raw/act files.
- Traxx has updated limits that mirror what the engine supports. Check it out to see what the new numbers are.
Binedit 2.3.0 - forum discussion and download link here
- added the aforementioned materials (glass, foliage)
- you can now click on a face to select it!
- it has an "export to blender" option. There are actually two places for this. The normal export, and an animated model export. They need slightly different things, so it appears in both cases.
Surprise additions:
- I wasn't planning on doing it this early, but TRI hid away the option to remove the background. So I added it in. You can toggle the show horizon (will rename this) and it will do away with the background. Some tracks will have a flicker problem and some will not. This needs fixing but I haven't gotten around to it. I have to admit, it looks nicer than I thought it would. And doing away with the sky texture and the backdrop is surprisingly not as bad as I thought it would be.
- DRAG WEEKEND IS HERE.
But that's not all
- TOURNAMENTS ARE HERE!!!! or should I say, ENHANCED TOURNAMENTS ARE HERE!!!!!!!! Enhanced? Well... let's just say there's some black magic going on behind the scenes. The longer you play a tournament, the more the results will vary so you know... to give you the feel of real competition ;) This works for all tournament modes BUT because computer opponents are so bad in circuits/rallies, it isn't really that noticeable there. Where it IS noticeable and works really well it's in the drags. So create a longer drag tournament and you will have some nice surprises. This is to say, when a tournament is created, specific personalities and abilities are assigned to each truck that will carry throughout the tournament. When you start a new tournament, they are given fresh. So these are not hardcoded per truck but they are assigned at tournament creation to random trucks and will be active for as long as you play in the tournament.
- I have fixed the computer trucks in the stock J drags but I have not verified how they work with sonic trucks option.
- opponent trucks can now run the red light or start more slowly.
- when you do a drag weekend, in qualification you will always run against an opponent. The result against the opponent doesn't matter. There is a technical reason for this. Getting a proper lap time to calculate the weekend brackets has proven to be a pain in the ass. So the qualification does two things. 1. You qualify. 2. It measures a time for the opponent trucks. They will run as always for the qualification run, perfect start etc. Then their time will be compared to what time you have saved in your hall of fame. Whichever one is faster wins and will be used as a baseline for the weekend to calculate AI brackets. If you actually watch the computers race each other, this doesn't matter as they will just use a normal race physics.
There is a movies additional download. These are HD version in .mp4 of the original videos. Make folder called Videos_HD in the mtm2 folder, copy it there and you will have HD versions.
This should contain everything that is needed, so it shouldn't be dependent on any of the previous patches.
I sincerely hope I have not introduced any bugs but the last two weeks, between working on 4 different programs at the same time (mtm2, cpod, traxx, binedit) and the hurricane, my head is spinning.
As always, if you run into bugs that you had previously and have not been fixed, please repost them. There is a very good chance I either missed them due to having so many things to work on, or I tried to fix it and it looked fixed on my end.
https://www.mtm2.com/~mtmg/misc/Beta0.51.zip
https://www.mtm2.com/~mtmg/misc/Beta0.51_hotfix9.zip <---- needs the files from .51, if you already have downloaded .51 then this is all you need
https://www.mtm2.com/~mtmg/misc/mtm2_videosHD.zip <--- it's 700mb!!! (fixed)
https://www.mtm2.com/~mtmg/misc/missing_video.zip <--- TOP02 had no sound
https://www.mtm2.com/~mtmg/misc/mtm2_cool_sky.zip <--- this is a nice seamless clear day sky texture i found. Perfect to show you how this works, just copy the folder into mtm2 and rename it to CLOUDY2.PNG (or just remove the _bonus) and voilla!
).
Will re-upload it soon!