WIP - Beta Released Stunt Rally 130 tracks converted for RoR

[CrystalHammer]

These are Stunt Rally tracks converted for RoR.

Tracks are licensed GPLv3.
This means you can modify and release only if you use the same license. Obviously crediting original author(s).


These tracks require SR assetpacks
- need to download all from this topic. Otherwise stuff will be black or missing.
and are working in recent RoR dev builds only
- downloads here, Linux still needs fix!

Old text: attached below is an older working build, which fixed bridge roll rotations. It is not needed anymore.
(I am still surprised you can attach binaries here).

Big screenshots gallery in below posts.

Total tracks count: 130 with road, plus 13 test tracks.
Some were modified to be drivable in RoR. This is about 55 % of all SR3 tracks.
Race timing works with road, checkpoints are wide and invisible (can see on surveymap).
Some tracks drive quite fast (when turns are banked) and feel just like in SR3.
I usually drive with fast cars like: Audi a4 (Rally or Hillclimber), MeanMachine Pack (Baja or Race) or Trophy Truck.


Notes:
So far I tested most of them should be fully drivable. Some may require fixing vehicle (a lot) or reseting with moving back etc.
There are also rare places, with sharp banked bridge turns that could be undrivable (need moving car).

I highly recommend turning off race cancelling for any reason (reset vehicle etc).
This can be done in by using my scripts.zip replacing original RoR resources/scripts.zip. Or by only replacing your races.as inside it.
Commented out stuff with // inside void eventCallback(int eventnum, int value).


On screenshot you can see in RoR:
- All SR based tracks in list have names starting with _ for order, to not mix them with all other.
- Preview image. These come from SR 2.x, so it really shows how tracks look in old SR, not in RoR.
This will look different/prettier (other sky, water, fog etc).
But it also can show a loop, jump or other things not present in RoR, but in old SR on this track.
- Description has much more info. Just like in SR, got from SR track editor. We see stats like Length, Rating (quality in SR), info text and
All this comes from SR and may not be adequate for RoR, like e.g. speed to jump, while it has been removed for RoR.

 

[CuriousMike]

Any plans on using the road meshes from SR? RoR's procedural roads aren't visually pleasing and a lot of sharp/banked turns are undrivable:

Also whatever this is on Beach City:


On Windows (D3D9) most maps have specular artifacts, strange as specular mapping is disabled in the OTC file.

 

[CrystalHammer]

Thanks for testing.
Well using SR roads code in RoR isn't an easy task and honestly I'm not even for trying. It's surely possible if devs wanted to.
I wrote it and it is more complex (worse to read and work with too), it has 4 dynamic LODs, merges by length, does pipes and trasitions to them, can do rivers, minimap preview colors, generates pacenotes etc.
It had to be separate and optional in RoR. And there is that road editor in RoR which obviously wouldn't work for it.

Yeah that thing on Beach City is just decoration in RoR. But drivable actually in SR, quoting:
"Has an abandoned pipe stunt area at sea. Optional, exploration only. Speeds for two jumps are 95 and 75 km/h. If you go too fast in the second stunt it is possible to do the second loop many times."

Argh freaking specular. IDK why it's so. I had this earlier but now:
Alpha is 0 in *_ds.png terrain textures. Specular is off in settings. I got no specular at all on terrain in GL.
So for me it's a bug in RoR, until someone tells me how can I fix this.

NormalMappingEnabled=1
# Whether to support specular mapping per layer in the shader (default true).
SpecularMappingEnabled=0

 

[CuriousMike]

Thankfully fixing the specular is simple, just enable specular mapping (SpecularMappingEnabled=1). Terrain now looks the same for me on D3D9 and OpenGL:

 

[CrystalHammer]

Ah okay good.

 

[CrystalHammer]

Okay I've added sr-tracks-v2 to 1st post and removed -v1.
Replaced in all to SpecularMappingEnabled=1. So it should fix terrain specular issue.
Also did small changes to time/sky on:
Des6-HighJumps
Spc1-Minerals
Wnt1-Cross
Wnt9-IceFrenzy

 

[CrystalHammer]

Track names start with scenery prefixes for:
Autumn, Australia, Canyon, Desert, Finland, Forest, Greece, Island, Jungle, Marble, Mars, Moss, Mud, Other, Savanna, Spring, Space, Stone, Surreal, Test, Toxic, Unidentified, Volcanic, Winter.

Big screenshots gallery:

 

[CrystalHammer]

continued..

 

[thomz92]

Downloaded and excited to start testing!

 

[CrystalHammer]

Added sr-tracks-v3.zip to 1st post, removed -v2.
Fixed: Aus9-RedDesert, Atm4-Scary,
and sky time on: Mrs1-Mars, Vlc9-Craters
And some missing/wrong preview images. This needs clearing cache to update.

 

[Fili86RaceFace]

info for this car? thx

 

[CrystalHammer]

Audi a4 Hillclimber

 

[only_a_ptr]

Regarding road meshes, The Pull Request 3030 introduces the ability to generate arbitrary meshes via AngelScript, so you can write a script that hides auto-generated meshes and creates new custom ones. The bundled script 'road_editor.as' can serve as example how roads are accessed dynamically. I once skimmed over SR codebase and I saw the meshes are actually generated in code, not by bending/repeating actual .mesh resource. AngelScript is very similar to C++, so the code should be quite portable to AngelScript. I don't like our default roads either.

Either way, thank you very much for contributing all these maps. It's a stream of fresh air into our pretty stale mapping scene (save for Mike's continuous efforts to dust off archive maps).

 

[thomz92]

These are great - adding collisions with all trees/rocks/objects (some you can just pass through) would be another huge leap IMHO. No doubt that's a lot of work, but it's always disappointing to slide right through something instead of wrecking

 

[CrystalHammer]

I updated 1st post.
Since a while it's possible to use just the RoR dev build. And those included builds aren't needed.

Apropos trees: I probably already wrote it but: Paged-geometry is like my most hated library at this point (the worst to use and slowest too). And placing trees sucks with it, in RoR. You can't even multiply count easy (it just makes more in those freaking square clusters). It's one of those earliest things I've replaced with our SR code for placing vegetation. I'm not going to bother with that at all in RoR. It's natural that RoR tracks don't have vegetation collisions (well except for Auriga or so). Giving vegetation collision on SR tracks would be a PITA to avoid them, since they appear on roads.

Apropos roads: I believe the best way would be to include old SR C++ code. IDK what's the deal with using scripts for so many things in RoR. Yes SR has no scripts at all, but it has a C++ tracks editor since early versions. So I believe C++ will be faster here also. On very long and complex tracks it can take a second or more to build road meshes in SR3 from C++, it's still just 1 CPU doing that. But yeah LODs and pipes need time. Porting that big complex code to other language is simply not an option if it could just build in RoR.
But like I wrote, I won't be even trying this. It is quite complex to integrate. I already moved to OgreNext, road mesh code changed, and I have other plans for road too like grid based merging (currently working for road columns). So I won't bother with this old SR code and RoR.
I won't be contributing to RoR either, since it's not my project and neither my speed or way of developing. I'm back to SR3 and adding stuff there my way, I recently added 2 hovercrafts, 3 hovering sci-fi cars and 2 drones.

As for tracks, well my main issue is that the only way now is:
- browsing this forum section, finding out this post, reading or seeing that it has 130 quality, new tracks
- downloading sr-tracks-v3.zip then
- going to other topic, downloading all other zips needed, finding out where to put them
- getting a RoR dev build downloaded and running.
That's way too difficult and complex.

I'd like them to be either just included with RoR itself (licenses allow it, but it'd 1.4 GB bigger), or in RoR's GUI repository browser e.g. with 1 click Download, or lastly in website Repository as 1 big zip file.
I think new RoR release would be good for this also. IDK how many times I asked about it.
Will any of this be possible or planned?