tamiami "build" thread (or sort of....)

[checkpoint10]

Here is my SG file if anyone can help.  I have spent 4 hours trying to get this to convert to 3D.  I want to understand what I am doing wrong.

Try removing the left pit wall which you had labelled "2". I did that and it works. Maybe there is something that TRK23D doesn't like about the combination of a curved section and a wall that touches another wall. Understand you still need a way to close off the pit island, but you might just need to take some creative liberties and do that further up or down the pit lane, whatever feels more natural.

[samsepi0l]

Here is my SG file if anyone can help.  I have spent 4 hours trying to get this to convert to 3D.  I want to understand what I am doing wrong.

Try removing the left pit wall which you had labelled "2". I did that and it works. Maybe there is something that TRK23D doesn't like about the combination of a curved section and a wall that touches another wall. Understand you still need a way to close off the pit island, but you might just need to take some creative liberties and do that further up or down the pit lane, whatever feels more natural.

Uggghhh... I feel so stupid.  You are right- that worked.  What I did to "close off the pit island" was just bring the walls in 46 very close together....  They don't actually touch but they are darn close.  It was able to convert to 3D OK.  I hope this does not come back to bit me later.



Thank you very much! I hope this helps someone else someday.

[samsepi0l]

I was able to get the track to load in OPE! You should have seen the smile on my face when I was "floating" magically above turn-1!

I had a heck of a time navigating around the track but I was able to do so using your notes in your "track editing progress" thread. I did find some mistakes (for example I put armco one place where I meant to have a curb). I also see I want to make some more changes in SFE. Super excited to get this far!

[checkpoint10]

Congrats! Looking forward to see the next steps. Hope you can get it into the game soon!

[samsepi0l]

So I messed with OPE more to see things in the track that I wanted to change. I'm talking about things I needed to change in SGE, and SFE. I made some changes and I think my track is even more realistic. Everything seems to have converted good. I think I am at the point where I start adding objects and graphics. I have been reading the tutorial and this part of the build seems really open. Are there any suggestions to what I should do next? I will probably spend a long time making the graphics as realistic as possible- any of you who have seen my carsets probably know how I like to do things. I know for example that I want to have several different "road textures" for the track. On parts of the track in the videos you can see there was a "dashed" bikepath around the circuit near the left side, but that's not present around the entire track. I assume I can change the texture for the road surface with several different textures. I remember that I saw pavel did this in mid-ohio where certain spots have the lighter colored grey sections of patchwork.

[checkpoint10]

So I messed with OPE more to see things in the track that I wanted to change.  I'm talking about things I needed to change in SGE, and SFE.  I made some changes and I think my track is even more realistic.  Everything seems to have converted good.  I think I am at the point where I start adding objects and graphics.  I have been reading the tutorial and this part of the build seems really open.  Are there any suggestions to what I should do next?  I will probably spend a long time making the graphics as realistic as possible- any of you who have seen my carsets probably know how I like to do things.  I know for example that I want to have several different "road textures" for the track. On parts of the track in the videos you can see there was a "dashed" bikepath around the circuit near the left side, but that's not present around the entire track.  I assume I can change the texture for the road surface with several different textures.  I remember that I saw pavel did this in mid-ohio where certain spots have the lighter colored grey sections of patchwork.

Have you been able to convert this track to work in the game? If you haven't, this might be a good time to do it, so that you can further validate your work by driving on it.

Aside from that, here's what I would focus on next:

1) Roadway markings - you can do these with TSD lines. You can try it in OPE first but likely you will want to edit the TSD file by hand.

2) Pit lane - once you figure out TSDs you can build a nicer looking pitlane and make a more functional pit lane in the track.txt file.

3) Wall height - there's a post somewhere about getting the wall heights to be more correct. You might want to apply that now before you start working on graphics.

From here, you would probably be starting to work on the graphics. I'd focus on the easier stuff and then move towards the harder stuff. Here's my ranking of easy to hard:

- Sky & horizon
- Simple objects that you are bringing in from another track
- Understand how to manually adjust positions and orientation of objects in the track.3D file, as well as change the colors of lines, fences, etc.
- Wall texturing using the MRK file
- Brake markers and trees
- Objects that you create yourself

I don't know how easy or hard it is to do the concrete patches on the track surface itself. Maybe Pavel can advise on this.

[samsepi0l]

One other thing I noticed, was that when I tested my track by running "ope.exe tamiami" it came up with pink lines where the track "paint" areas and fence areas are.  Is this something I should be worried about?

[checkpoint10]

One other thing I noticed, was that when I tested my track by running "ope.exe tamiami" it came up with pink lines where the track "paint" areas and fence areas are.  Is this something I should be worried about?

You can fix it later by editing the colors at the beginning of the track.3d file, or possibly editing it in 3DOEd. But I wouldn't worry about that for now, I'd focus on getting it in the game first.

[samsepi0l]

I was successfully able to convert the horiz.mip to horiz.bmp for editing.  I did not realize that winmip needs sunny.pcx in the same folder when you try and do the conversion, but now I know.

It appears that the horizon file is 32 pixels by 1600 pixels.  I'm going to have a hard time with this probably because on google maps the street view of tamiami is busy with many objects.

Once I have my bitmap, I loaded it in GIMP and I notice the BMP has a slightly different pallet than what I am normally used to using when I make my carsets. Is it OK to just use this pallet after I convert back from 32 million colors to the games map?

What I am asking is, should I make my changes in GIMP and then save this just like I would your typical carset graphics?

[checkpoint10]

I was successfully able to convert the horiz.mip to horiz.bmp for editing.  I did not realize that winmip needs sunny.pcx in the same folder when you try and do the conversion, but now I know.

It appears that the horizon file is 32 pixels by 1600 pixels.  I'm going to have a hard time with this probably because on google maps the street view of tamiami is busy with many objects.

Once I have my bitmap, I loaded it in GIMP and I notice the BMP has a slightly different pallet than what I am normally used to using when I make my carsets.  Is it OK to just use this pallet after I convert back from 32 million colors to the games map? 

What I am asking is, should I make my changes in GIMP and then save this just like I would your typical carset graphics?

All the textures in your track should use the same colors as sunny.pcx including the colors in the higher indexes that you don't normally use for cars, so that's what you might be noticing is different from your carsets. I would suggest saving the RGB color version of your horizon as a backup, before reducing it to the 256-color palette, in case you decide to change the higher colors in your track's sunny.pcx at a later point.

I started discussing colors in a recent post in my other thread (Track editing progress notes (icr2.net)), you might refer there for more detail on how the typical sunny.pcx works.