Nordschleife Tourist v0.1 by pleclair

[VELOCIPEDE]

Well, this is not a release at the moment. I wish to bring a point.
Last week, I started playing more of Assetto Corsa, and have fallen in love with it. It wasn't long that I wanted to lap around my Nordschleife, and I couldn't.
That's when I found Snoopy's v0.93 version, but it wasn't riding well, so I decided I would convert my track to AC.
I had all the terrain converted, and I got to the trees. I found out AC didn't supported billboards, so I was out of luck for my forests.
I tried swapping my billboard plane meshes for Y meshes in Forest Pack Pro, but at the moment, FP resets the vertex normal I have set up as a sphere around the mesh so it light up properly.
So I couldn't get them to look right. I was bummed out. I wrote a support email to Itoo software (makers of Forest Pack Pro) and told them about my issue. It's likely to be fixed in an update.
So in the meantime, I'm a bit out of luck. There is a work around, but not really what I was intending.
That's when I thought I would give GTR Evo's nord a try. The trees on this track are already non-billboards, so it went much better.
The road mesh was better to drive before I upgraded it than the com8 version when it wasn't upgraded either.
I have worked on the road mesh a lot and did a really good job on it. I did it all manually by flow connect.
Most of the mats are also converted to AC mats, and the track is looking amazingly good in AC, even with the lower resolution textures the track haves.
I haven't swapped much textures at the moment, only starting on it... I had to change the grass however, since the way the mats were made, the first base texture was a dirt/sand one for all the large scale grass around everywhere, so I had dirt/sand everywhere, and I couldn't find a way to set up a tex1 add tex2 mul tex3 shaders in AC to reproduce the original grass, so I took my own grass instead and set it up.
My initial intention was to send the v0.1 version I have now, but after reading the topic on copyrighted content, I think I'll hold on to it for now.
Here is my point of view on the matter:
I wish no harm to anyone. I respect others work as much as possible, and have bought all the textures I have used in my own conversion of Nord, as well as any scripts/plugins I used (forest pack pro cost nearly 300$ for example), and I'm proud to support indie devs whenever I can.
In this case, the track have been made more than 5 years ago. The game it belongs too is still a nice game, and I play it from time to time to drive the many cars there is in race07 on the nordschleife, but as of today's standard, that game falls short, not on the graphics, they are still fine if you ask me, I wouldnt mind lapping on it if it had rf2 or AC physics/ffb... but the race07 one doesnt cut it for me.
SimBin made a bundle of money already with this product, and I would believe GTR Evo has been a buying factor for race07 for many owners, myself included.
I doubt many to this day are purchasing this however to play it on a regular basis.
Last year, when I started my conversion, I asked SimBin, if we could work something together... I wanted to use their model, but replace most of the assets, as I did with the com8 version.
I also wanted to include their logo on the loading screen, and suggest people to buy gtr evolution, since anyway its now dirt cheap.
So in the end, I doubt allowing a conversion at this point in time would have cut much into their revenue, and I would think it might also have increased them.
However, they never answered me back, totally ignoring me. I hate when people ignore me. And always had it on the heart ever since.
Also, it's not like SimBin didnt benefit from other conversions, and lots of them coming from other games as well.
Another thing I thought, since most people in the racing sim community don't play one game only, and a lot have a growing collection of sim titles, its safe to assume that most interested and knowing the track well already have already bought in the past GTR Evo to play the best nordschleife there was on PC until now. So what is the real harm here, since most will already have GTR Evolution, and a few might be willing to buy it to support SimBin given the release (if it happens) goes smoothly and without hitch.
So I dunno what I should do now.
Here is how the track is looking at the moment in AC:

 

fonte AC forum

[PandaR1]

Non ne capisco il senso... la conversione di snoopy ormai e' favolosa, a che pro spendere energie su una pista che gia' c'e' ottima e sara' comunque realizzata in laserscan?

[baronesbc]

in attesa della versione in laser scan, poter girare su una conversione fatta dal Nords di gtr evo sarebbe stupendo (senza dubbio la versione migliore su PC)..

ma come è successo per rf2, non credo che i simbin daranno il permesso per utilizzarla, peccato...

[Petrarca]

Non ne capisco il senso... la conversione di snoopy ormai e' favolosa, a che pro spendere energie su una pista che gia' c'e' ottima e sara' comunque realizzata in laserscan?

La versione dei Simbin non ha nulla a che vedere con quella di Com8, è la migliore che io abbia mai guidato su PC, ed a quanto pare questo tizio dice di aver già molto lavoro fatto e non dovrebbe avere particolari problemi ad inserirla su AC.

Detto questo, con tutto il rispetto per Snoopy, io non avrei nessun dubbio su quale pista utilizzare, e come me penso anche tanti altri... Il problema è che i Simbin non glielo concederanno ne ora ne mai, se il tizio riuscirà a rilasciarla il link durerà giusto qualche ora molto probabilmente... Ma ne dubito fortemente, finirà come con la versione per rF2, non vedrà mai la luce.

Edit: anticipato da barone

Edited June 26, 2014 by Petrarca