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Topics - Freak-DS

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1
Projects / RWB 911 "Stella"
« on: Jan 25, 2016, 12:03 PM »
Hey guys!

Since the voting for the next project in the pipeline has finished, here's the thread to the winner project!

Stella for NFS was started back in february 2013, almost 3 years ago, when I messed a bit with NFS:U2 and needed bodykits for a planned conversion of our 930 turbo. Until september last year, it was really just a bodykit in that U2 project file, which is discontinued. Yet I didn't want to let that work rot on my hdd, so I decided to give it a run for NFS:HS. So far I'm quite fond of the ingame result, the only minus for me is that you cannot add camber to the wheels in HS.

The current state of the art of the widened 911 is far progressed already, therefore, the exterior needs very little work until the basic car itself is finished. So far, we are talking about 6910 polys (tris) with pretty much all needed parts.

To-Do-List so far:

- Add body lines for the attached widening kit
- Remap interior
- Add engine bay
- Close bottom
- Add roof cam for dashview
- Add performance
- ???
-> Release


The performance is going to be an issue. Stella does not feature a turbocharged 930/66 engine like our 930 turbo but a naturally aspirated 3.8 liter engine with carburettors and double ignition. In short, finding accurate tech specs for that car is likely a problem. The stock engines of that generation of n/a 911 featured a peak of 3,2 liters displacement with just a little over 230 hp.

What I got so far from Speedhunters:

  • weight: 980 kg
  • displacement: 3,8 liters
  • power output: 360 hp
  • redline: 8500 rpm
  • transmission: 915

There's been a couple of different gear sets for the 915 transmission type, the engine torque is nowhere to be found, neither are acceleration times. If you happen to find performance specs of that specific car please post them here!











2
Projects / Choose a Project! - 01/16
« on: Jan 16, 2016, 2:37 PM »
Hey guys!

It's been a bit silent in this particular section of the forums - so let's fill it with some life!

For the next seven days, you will be able to vote for the next car that is going to roll out of our virtual shop. The candidates are:

1.) The 6-years-candidate:


2.) The endless project:


3.) The boosted housewife:


4.) The next generation:


5.) The irrational one:


Depending on the activity of this, multiple cars with the same points score will either lead to us picking a favourite out of those or a round two of the voting. Pick your favourite and let's see where this is going!

3
Editing Projects / Porsche Test Track Leipzig
« on: Nov 01, 2014, 12:09 PM »
Hey, guys!

Ever since T3ED was released, I used to play a little bit with it. Adding crappy alternative routes to EA tracks or altering little details in addon tracks that bothered me was what I did with it all the time. Since about 2010, every now and then when I felt like editing a track, I began a big project.
What started this was, there was somebody who told me, it would be impossible to recreate a race track for NFS:HS that would resemble an actually existing one. Too complicated would be matching AI lines, proportions, details, etc. As far as I know, except for a medium quality done Daytona, there is no such track for HS.

What I want to present to you now is a project, that is as mentioned going on for four years, which I am going to be working on every now and then, Porsche's Test Track in Leipzig. Basically, this track is a mashup of the most famous corners of race tracks around the world, to allow Porsche proper tests of their cars and customers a lap of their lifetime. I haven't been there personally yet, I will visit it some time. However, out of the mentioned comment that I took as challenge and boredom, I took Raceway 3 in T3ed and started squeezing, bending, dragging and pushing the track in the correct shape. Then, I began deleting lots of things except for the road itself, and rebuild the scenery. I had no Idea how much work that would be.
The track shape is as accurate as it could be done with T3ed, reference for it was taken off Google Maps. Whenever I will make some significant progress on this, aside of RSR and F-Body projects, I will post it here.

As you know, I love teasing you, so I will share these three images with you for now:







Stay tuned. Learn more about Porsche Leipzig here.

4
Projects / Concerning future releases
« on: Jan 24, 2014, 2:13 PM »
Dear NFS:HS fans,

as some of you might know, one core feature of our addon cars used to be a very detailed dashview. As you might know aswell, we haven't uploaded any addons in forever though. The reason for this is that both of us, Cooya! and myself, have very few spare time to work on addon cars for HS presently.

We would still like to provide some quality addon cars to you, with a realistic performance, original colors, eventually a show case and, as usually, detailed exterior models. However, the dashviews in our addons will be discontinued to allow a somewhat more frequent addon release. I'm actually sad to say this because to me, it was always important to provide as much original car features as possible. However, it makes me more sad to find all those meshes rotting on my harddrives because the dashviews, which take forever to make, are not finished.

In the last few days, you were teased a bit with some progressed meshes, e.g. the 924 SCCA, the 997-2 GT3 RS or the 993 GT1 street version. These cars and more will be released in near future. Dashviews might follow some day as kind of patch, but no guarantee on that.

Best regards,
Freak-DS

5
This topic has been moved to Editing Projects.

6
Projects / Porsche 924 Turbo
« on: Feb 17, 2012, 1:13 AM »

The Porsche 924 turbo was the second evolutionary step for the 924. Still having the 2.0 liter cylinder block, but a different cylinder head, boost pipes and a turbocharger, it reached up to 177 hp in the second, more stable version.
The 924 turbo was the base for the 924 Carrera GT and GTS, having only a turbocharger and not an aircooler added to it. The 924 turbo's first version with 7 hp less was produced for only two years, from 1979 to 1980, the second version was produced from 1981 to 1982.
Still being a quite exclusive car, the 924 turbo just has to go to NFS4 - so here's our latest project! Have a look:


 
The pics show, of course, just a beta version, with some untextured parts, the final result will take some more time.
The 931 will have a nice feature, since it could be ordered with several bicolor schemes aswell, we wanted to include them. However, there were two different layouts.. but we managed to include both of them - here's a preview:


7
NFS:HS Support / SP/EP, Glide and Windows Seven
« on: Feb 13, 2012, 1:50 PM »
As some people might have experienced, if you try using the StockPack or ExpansionPack and Glide Wrapper under NFS 4, the loading cursor will always appear on a static position and doesnt want to go away. The solution is very simple.

Set the compatibility mode setting for the nfshs.exe to Vista SP2, apply, start it, and you'll see: cursor gone.

Why is that so? Well, a guess by mine, many other programs such as ICQ and MSN Messenger wont minimize to the tray area on Win 7 anymore; microsoft seems to have disabled some function for it. The nfshs.exe from the SP should minimize to it after starting, but doesnt - making the cursor hang onscreen. Setting the comp.mode to Vista will solve that on many other programs,too.

8
NFS:HS Support / Using the Glide-Wrapper
« on: Feb 13, 2012, 1:50 PM »
This is a short and simple tutorial to show you, how to use the Glide-Wrapper for NFS:High Stakes, like this, you will be able to get resolutions higher than 640 x 480 in the menu and the original special effects.

First of all, we need the StockPack or the ExpansionPack. Get them here:

http://www.freak-ds.de/dl-tools.php

We will use the StockPack for this. After you downloaded the setup, double-click and run it. The setup will automatically configure the best settings for you PC, in case you already installed it uncheck everything and select the Glide-Wrapper, if you install this for the first time, just check the Glide-Wrapper, too:



After a successful installation of the StockPack, run the 3D-Setup of NFS 4 and select the Voodo entry:



Click "Ok". Now a warning will appear, just click "yes":



Now this window should appear:



Select "Application specific overrides:" , search for the NFS 4 entry and use these settings. Then your NFS:HS should have the same resolution all the time now, in my case 1280 x 960:


9
NFS:HS Workshop / Alpha channels with GIMP
« on: Feb 13, 2012, 1:48 PM »
Thanks to AJ_Lethal for this tutorial! I'll post it over here to make sure it won't get lost.
-----------------
(download off-line tutorial here - click on the icon, then "download")

 NFSHS (and NFS3) car textures (car00.tga) do have something called "alpha channel", which tells the game what kind of colors are assignated for the car. To edit them, people usually has Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro to do the job, but if you are broke (and want to stay legal), there's a third way: GIMP.

 GIMP is basically the freeware alternative to Photoshop, with some interesting features. But when it comes to editing alpha channels, it could be a royal PITA to accomplish the task. Luckly, I figured it out and I'm going to tell you how to do it.

    Step 1: Meeting GIMP and asking her out
    The first time you fire up GIMP, it would look like this:

    [list=1]
    • Toolbox: This is the place where are located the painting and selection tools, mostly. The foreground/background color selection is also in there.
    • Tool Options: Here you can adjust the selected tool parameters.
    • Layers/Channels/Paths Undo: Here you will see the images layers for edition. We´re are going to focus only on the Layers and Undo (in case you screw up).
    • Brushes/Patterns/Gradients: IMO these are redundant, since they can be setted up from their respective tools. In fact, the only use I found for them was adding/editting brushes, but we won't make that kind of stuff in here right now.
    The toolbars can be customized to your liking, but we're going to use the default layout for this tutorial.

    Step 2: Let's put the channel together
    At this point, I will assume you will have your shiny new texture map ready for this. But you don't want to risk your precious job in case you screw up, right? Well, I packed a testing texture map file (test.bmp) attached to this tutorial in here.

     The map as you see, is weird (since it's a testing map, don't try to figure out it's sense, otherwise you will end up in a psych ward for the rest of your life)

     Alright, let's put our hands to work.

    • Go to File > Open (or Ctrl+O, if you regonize the keyboard as the supreme speed king) and look for the "test.bmp" file. Open it (duh).   Your GIMP screen will look like this:

    • Go to the the layers panel and right click the current layer we're working on (Background) and select "Add Layer Mask...". In the following dialog, under the "Initialize Layer Mask to:" section,  select "White (full opacity)"and hit OK. The layer window will change to this:


    The image thumbnail's clone next to the original image thumbnail's, is the mask layer. When you create (or import) one, GIMP will automatically switch to it, so you can start to work on it right away. When you work on the mask layer, the layer's thumbnail corresponding to the mask layer will have a white outline (well, currently we can't tell that at first glance since the mask is currently white, lol), and the same applies if you work on the image itself. Now click the image's thumbnail to work on the image, we need to select the areas for the colors.
    • Use the Fuzzy Select Tool (keyboard: U) and select the gray area with the white stripe (you can use the Free Select Tool -keyboard: F- as well, that's useful if you want to select a part of the image from it´s surroundings), we´ll pretend this is the main body color. Now switch to the mask layer and click the foreground color in the toolbox. This dialog will pop-up:


    Write 224 on the R, G and B spaces, then hit OK. That shade of gray you will get is the alpha color for the main body color of the car (RGB: 224,224,224 / HSV: 0,0,88 / HTML:  E0E0E0). Your image will look like this:

    • Now, since I'm too damn lazy, I will let you finish the alpha channel; the parts remaining are:

    -White stripe: secondary body color (RGB: 96,96,96 / HSV: 0,0,38 / HTML:  606060)
    -Gray drops area: interior color (RGB: 160,160,160 / HSV: 0,0,63 / HTML:  a0a0a0)
    -Gray rectangle: driver's hair color (RGB: 32,32,32 / HSV: 0,0,13 / HTML:  202020)
    -Blue rectangle: anything you want transparent (RGB: 0,0,0 / HSV: 0,0,0 / HTML:  000000)

     You should have got something like this:


    Now let's proceed to the last step.
    [/list]

    Step 3: Saving the alpha (and the file)
    Now that we have the alpha ready, it's time to save it, alongside the file. Right-click the "Background" layer and select "Apply Layer Mask". Now the alpha will merge with the image. Then go to File > Save / Save As... (keyboard: Ctrl+S / Ctrl+Shift+S) and save it as car00.tga.

     A dialog will appear. Set it this way:

    And you're done. Is not that difficult, isn't?


    Additional notes
    If you want to edit an existng file's alpha channel, right-click the "Background" layer, select "Add Layer Mask", check the "Transfer Layer's Alpha Channel" option. Edit as you desire and save as described in Step 3.

    I hope this tutorial will be useful to you. AJ signing out.

    10
    NFS:HS Workshop / Driver movement
    « on: Feb 13, 2012, 1:46 PM »


    One great advantage of NFS 4 is, that it, unlike other games (NFS Porsche for example), allows users to have an animated driver in their addon cars. The driver movement is not a saved 3d animation in the file, it's being calculated. This tutorial explains the necessary settings to get this working.

    Needed programs (plain editing, no re-import etc.)

    - Z-Modeler (v1.07b recommended)

    Step1)

    You need to import your car to Z-Modeler to do this.
    First, click on your driver (only :OD !) in vertex mode. Then select all the vertexes and open "Plugins/FCE Settings" (top bar). There is one extra setting that only works in points mode, which is the driver movement setting. If you are unable to select it, reselect all points, untick the box. That should look like following:



    Now unselect all polies again, and only select the vertexes of the steering wheel, the drivers hand, and, if necessary, the first vertex row of the arm. The given example with our standard driver, a modified EA original, the arms just have one step, so only steer and hands have to be selected.
    After selecting them, now tick the Rotateable attribute for them. Like this:



    Now, the driver will steer, but eventually you will have to correct the axis of the :OD part to get correct movement. The vertexes are rotated around the parts axis. To correct the axis, go in parts mode, deselect any selection shape (circle/box). To move and rotate it, use (main toolbar) Display / Local Axis / Move  or  Rotate, click on the part (it should be light blue then) and move it's axis. The axis should have the same angle as the steering wheel. Note: thats not the case in the picture! Once placed, it should look similar to this:



    Now export your FCE, test the result, if necessary correct the axis position and you're done.

    11
    NFS:HS Workshop / "Normals" - Simple mesh shading
    « on: Feb 13, 2012, 1:44 PM »


    One very important thing you'll come across when it comes to modifying or modeling a car from scratch, are normals. You might ask yourself now, what are normals? Normals on a 3d model have the purpose to make different surfaces visible without modeling edges and so save polies. The example in this tutorial is a part of a quite edgy car from the seventies / eighties, the Porsche 924:



    The most important thing is, that you have to understand and recognize the different surfaces, edges and shapes of a car. If you don't, you won't be able to get a perfect mesh. On a side note a little tip, whenever you work on a car, try to find it in reality and look at it, take photos and so understand the design. On our example you should recognize the marked surfaces as basic different reflecting areas:



    When you create a mesh from scratch, you need to align polies properly and so allow the polies to follow these surfaces. You can't make a border with normals where no splines are. This is our example mesh with the corresponding lines drawn on the wireframes which obey the surface borders:



    However, you do notice the way too smooth shading and the black spots around the plate, thats where you can see that only following the lines doesnt automatically generate those surfaces. That's our plain mesh without normals and textures:



    Here you can see a few of the wrong reflections (too smooth / black spots)



    The next step is to detach the different surfaces. This will be explained on the center line only.

    Step 1: Select the polies in faces mode
    Step 2: Use Create/Objects/Detach to make your surface become a sepparate object
    Step 3: Use Surface / Normals / Calculate to get the lighting information of the surfaces recalculated; Fuse your object and your detach by selecting both in object mode, and clicking on them with Create/Objects/Unite Select , and there you go.



    Take a closer look and you will notice the difference of before and after. Once you've finished, you should have a proper result, like this:



    Good normals are a highly important aspect for a car's quality. A lot of bad looking cars can be saved with some work on the normals. Again the reminder, make sure you understood the shape. Another thing to watch are the flat shades, they should be somewhat plain, however they still have to represent the actual shape of the car.

    Difficult spots such as the side air intake on our Porsche 969 require a lot of work as you'll have to figure out a good polie structure allowing good reflections without wasting polies. Often you just have to try out different polie structures, sometimes turning the polie row direction may help. Just to give you an idea of how much work that tiny air intake was, I've worked for roundabout six hours on getting a good result.

    12
    NFS:HS Workshop / Dashviews
    « on: Feb 13, 2012, 1:42 PM »
    The NFS 4 dashviews can be quite complicated when going for a higher detail level with lots of small details. Here is a tutorial on how to name these parts and how to sort these correctly, in order to avoid visibility problems.

    The _[X] things like _PM, _L and _W are special parts. _PM and _DM are the mirrors, they have to be shiney so by naming a part e.g. ":F :L_PM PassengerMirror" NFS knows it has to be displayed when looking forward and to the left and that it has to be shiney. The view attributes like :F :B :L :R :S are added in front of the part name with a space between and no underline.
    The _PM.. attributes are added directly behind the part name without a space. After _PM, you make a space and type a part name. So basically it's like this:

    |:F(space):R|_Attribute|(space)Partname|

    Sides:
    :F Visible when looking forward
    :L Visible when looking to the left
    :R Visible when looking to the right
    :B Visible when looking backward
    :S Function is unclear.

    - all view attributes can be combined, they can be sorted any way you wish to.

    Attributes:

    _PM Passenger mirror (reflective)
    _DM Driver mirror (reflective)
    _W Steering wheel
    _L Lit dash

    _____

    Include the _PM or _DM attribute to body parts visible in your dash (e.g. front fenders, spoilers, hoods etc., but if you do that you should not use the mirror parts (:OLM, :ORM) on the exterior because when wrecking your car, the mirror parts will disappear in the exterior view and in the dashview - so all _PM and/or _DM parts are gone. So fuse the mirrors with the :HB.

    Dashview parts have to be sorted in the opposite visible order. Your steeringwheel is in front of the roof, so put the roof at the top of the list, and the steer somewhere under it. A good hint for the part order are EA dashes, but careful, you gotta detach a LOT of parts in order to get the correct visibility. Just as another hint: Our cars dashviews have up to 40 parts or even more!

    Additionally, NFS:HS crashes when you use more than 67 parts.

    13
    NFS:HS Workshop / Texture alpha channel
    « on: Feb 13, 2012, 1:40 PM »
    Here is a picture which explains what alpha color is used for what effect ingame:



    Basically, the NFS 4 alphachannel only supports six different colors. Sorted by brightness, here they are:

    1) RGB 255 - White - Just solid texture without colors or transparency, 100% RGB channel.
    2) RGB 230 - This is the first colour slot, it's used for the primary body color.
    3) RGB 182 - Slot two, used for interior color.
    4) RGB 118 - The third slot is used either for decals or for the convertible roof, it's the secondary body color.
    5) RGB 46   - And the last of all four color slots, is the driver hair color, which is used for a second decal color in upgrades, too.
    6) RGB 0    - Black - 100% transparent, RGB channel pixels will not be displayed.

    The usage of white and black cannot be changed, however, you can freely use all four color slots for any parts you want, they don't have to be assigned like EA did.

    Additionally, these color codes work aswell:

    224-Main color
    160-Interior Color
    96-Secondary Color
    32-Driver hair

    (Thanks to AJ_Lethal!)

    14
    NFS:HS Workshop / CAR.FCE Part names
    « on: Feb 13, 2012, 1:38 PM »
    Hello users,
    for the people interested in modding,here is a list of part-names that you can use in NFS 4 FCE's and what they are good for.

    Code: [Select]
    HB     | High detailed body (LOD0);          | chrome:on  | damage:on  |
    HLFW   | High detailed left front wheel;     | chrome:off | damage:off |
    HLRW   |   "      "   left rear  wheel;      | chrome:off | damage:off |
    HRFW   |   "      "   right front wheel ;    | chrome:off | damage:off |
    HRRW   |   "      "   right rear wheel;      | chrome:off | damage:off |
    LB     | Low detailed body (LOD2);           | chrome:on  | damage:on  |
    MB     | Medium detailed body (LOD1);        | chrome:on  | damage:on  |
    MLFW   | Medium detailed left front wheel;   | chrome:off | damage:off |
    MLRW   |     "     "   left rear wheel;      | chrome:off | damage:off |
    MRFW   |     "     "   right front wheel;    | chrome:off | damage:off |
    MRRW   |     "     "   right rear wheel;     | chrome:off | damage:off |
    OC     | Car interior;                       | chrome:on  | damage:off |
    OD     | Driver body;                        | chrome:on  | damage:off | can be animated
    ODL    | Dashboard lights                    | chrome:off | damage:off | shading off (glowing effect)
    OH     | Driver head                         | chrome:on  | damage:off | animated (follows opponents & cursor)
    OL     | Popup headlights                    | chrome:on  | damage:on  | only visible when light is turned on
    OLM    | Left exterior mirror;               | chrome:on  | damage:off | disappears when being damaged
    OND    | Empty driver's seat                 | chrome:off | damage:off | useful on cop cars only
    ORM    | Right exterior mirror;              | chrome:on  | damage:off | disappears when being damaged
    OS     | Animated rear spoiler               | chrome:on  | damage:on  | goes up while braking or accelerating
    OT     | Convertible roof;                   | chrome:on  | damage:on  |
    TB     | Very low detailed body (LOD3);      | chrome:on  | damage:on  |

    15
    NFS:HS Workshop / Language files
    « on: Feb 13, 2012, 1:37 PM »
    As you may know, in NFS4's car.viv-files there are a lot of files named "fedata.xxx" - these are the language files. Sometimes you may have the problem that you install an addon and it won't appear ingame.
    This may happen because the author didn't put in the Fedata for your language. As example, if you have a german game, you need the "fedata.ger" in the viv.

    Solving this is easy. Open the car in NFS-Wizzard, find any fedata file, copy it, rename the ending to your language and save the viv file.

    These are the fedata files that are supported and what language they are for:

    • fedata.bri   - British
    • fedata.eng - English
    • fedata.fre   - French
    • fedata.ger  - German
    • fedata.ita   - Italian
    • fedata.spa  - Spanish
    • fedata.swe  - Swedish

    The list may be incomplete for some other language versions like australian or japanese game, but these are the ones found in the EA viv files that I know.

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