Welcome..... to the Nordschleife

When our beloved rFactor2 track broke after build 770, all trees missing and looking in a sorry state, with Pleclair all giving up and gone to AC, I thought I would have a look at the problem.
After a lot of poking around in the files, trying different things, found a very small error in the scn file and as by magic all the trees were back working again . Nothing to do with outdated GMT files or anything like that.

I thought, before making a quick update for everyone to enjoy the track with working trees again, I thought about adding some league friendly stuff to it. I've done this many times before for our league; more pit boxes, start lights, spaced out starting grids etc. I also wanted to fix some unfinished LOD issues with pop ups etc. with the track.

When I posted info on the forum that I was going to release a fix soon, Tosch come forward and said he has some texture adjustment on saturation, alpha channel, spec, bump maps and HDR profiles. He sent me what he had and I was amazed. He even had an alt Autumn layout version. The work he had done was based on v1.5 but he soon updated 1.65 to the same standard.

So, we been working together for last 2 weeks improving the track in more ways than we had planned too. The list is endless, here are just some of the things that were done.
I know you guys like change logs, so here goes:-

DJC change log v1.65 to v1.70 22/07/14
- Fixed broken trees
- Added 104 grid spots, with first 20 more spaced out than the rest (Test your 64 bit versions of rfactor2 on this I dare you)
- Added 20 pit boxes
- Added 40 garages (<-had some help from Tosch here)
- In pit area, lowered pavements by 4cm's to help AI leave area without getting stuck on them. Making the track online friendly is easy making it AI friendly is not so
- Added start lights to the bridge (race mode only)
- Made 759 LOD changes in order to both improve FPS and reduce pop up's where needed
- Fixed 3 holes in the road
- Cleaned up the camp sites, removing some of the not so finished looking items like flying people, and floating camper vans.
- Fixed a sign that said 'Start Timed Lap Here', it was only viewable from the back but not from the front.
- Fixed the roof on the ticket house.
- Made pitlane 0.5 metres wider to help AI pit without crashing.
- Added tire stack at pit entrance to make it more visible from road.
- Fixed the odd flickering bush.
- Removed a number of trees that were growing outside the guardrails. (I would have fixed a lot more but found 3DSimED3 was braking the Billboarding effect of the trees, so could not use a lot of what I had done, sorry)
- Made the café and the ticket house visible with track detail set to low. People where reporting great big holes in the area where they would have been.
- Added two floating hot air balloons, one made with Germany flag colours and one with Nordschleife logo on it.
- Got Tosch's wheel track map working.
Now that was just the stuff I changed, now for all the great stuff Tosch did. Here is his change log....

Tosch change log v1.65 to v1.70 22/07/14
Texture adjustments:
- Adjusted the saturation and brightness for most of the diffuse textures
- Created new normal maps.
- Created new specular maps.
- Re-sized textures
- Removed the bug where you would get a black line floating above trees
- Exchanged 2 tree textures (oak trees)
- New guardrail texture + high res normal map (normal map has a huge impact on the specular reflection) + new specmap
- Added alpha channel for road reflection (wet and mirage) to all road and roadside textures (kerbs, rumble…).
- Added alpha channel to all road and roadside specmaps.
- Exchanged grass textures and added some flowers.
- New textures for some bushes (borrowed from ISI tracks) and alpha channel modification (more transparency) for x-shape bushes and grass billboards.
Layouts:
- Created a new layout “Nordschleife Tourist Autumn”
- Layout is the same as the Summer layout but the track has modified tree textures (and some other green stuff) and no crowd, marshals, tents, etc. in all sessions.
- Race date is 27th of October 2014. Different sun elevation, times for sunrise/sunset.
- Race date for the Summer layout is 14th of July 2014. DST is enabled (daylight saving time).
- At full track detail the Summer layout has an increasing number of track side objects (crowds, tents, marshals and other stuff). Depends on the session (practice, qualifying, race).
- New loading screens and icons.
- New wheel track map
- VehicleConfig.ini for Indycar road configuration is included.
- Realistic default weather profiles
SCN-file adjustments:
- Improved car reflections (Refmap0)
- Added omni lights to fireplaces. Fires are only visible at full track detail, at night, during race in summer layout (VisGroups=(1217)). (See known bugs)
- Added some omni lights to the garage area, fuel station Doettinger Hoehe and Breidscheid.
CAM-file:
- Improved LOD multi and Clip planes for better performance.
- Added some tv cams and adjusted some camera positions.
- There is a tv camera on top of the Nuerburg (high LOD and high view distance). Leave the track on the public road (traffic circle) to activate it. You can also press 3 times “End-key” in tv cam mode while sitting in the pits.
- Added background bird sounds to cameras
HDR profile:
- I have included 3 different hdr profiles for each layout
If you change the hdr profile, leave the track and start a new session. Otherwise the profile becomes way to dark. rFactor needs to reset the black point setting and create a new currentProfile.hdp file.
Real Road:
- 4 different real road presets:-
Medium rubber, Full wet medium rubber, Drying line, 55 percent wet. I’ve created this file in devmode. Should be good to observe different dry states of the track.
- The road reflection may look strange in some situations. The reason is that atm only the sky is reflected. To add the reflections of trackside objects the track needs reflection planes for all elevation changes. That's a job for a pro and not a noob like me.
TDF file adjustments:
- Removed dust from kerbs and run off's.
- Fixed a grass material that had no friction at Döttinger Höhe, was like driving on ice.

As said in Tosch's change LOG (above) there are differences from session to session, see below..


SUMMER LAYOUT

Practice Session:
This is just like your normal track day at the Ring. Less spectators, no flags, no tents, clean and uncluttered.

Qualify Session:
You now have spectators here to watch you qualify. They come with their tents, flags and banners. They're here to party and watch you put on a good show, all overlooked by a bunch of helpful marshals.

Race Session:
As qualify but now more spectators.
Bridge now has a set of start lights.
104 start grid.
Watch out in night races, you might see the odd camp fire lighting your way to victory.

~Spectators, flags and tents only visible with track detail set to full~


AUTUMN LAYOUT

Practice, Qualify and Race Session:
No spectators, no flags, no tents, clean and uncluttered.

Known bugs:-
- Fires only appear between 9:40pm-10:30pm and 5:30am-5:37am. We don't know why this is, we think it's an rFactor2 bug.
- Trees growing out of guard rails.

I think Tosch has done some amazing work on the look of the track.
This all is not to take away any credit from Pleclair and Com8 who did an outstanding job on this track. Big well done to them. The amount of work you two put into this track is incredible.
Whether this is our 1st of many or 1st and last version, we do not know. Tosch hasn't much use of 3DMAx, and me none at all. But we do hope you will enjoy what we have done and achieved.

Download link:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/8i...rist_170.rfcmp 623Meg
or https://mega.co.nz/#!jggS2QbQ!6-pNF6...E9DhhJrT8j6RAA

By the way if anyone wants to upload a mirrors, please do so. We also looking for downloads that will work with the 'Get Missing Components' online button. I understand 'drop box' files work well. It's all set up, just needs the links.

Happy playing

from

DJC and TOSCH