While working on car set for upcoming online championships, I have also working on converting Nürburgring Gesamtstrecke from GTR2.

Originally track was made by Kackbratze for rFactor, who combined the Nordschleife70 by MotorFX and Südschleife by Nick303. Lachub and Losch then converted it for GTR2.

Basic conversion is done and technically track works fine. I remade Südschleife part cameras and used quite bit infos from MotorFX's GTL Nordschleife70 to make sure that everything is ok. I also fixed fuel consumption numbers and all that sort of small things. I have started to reach out the original authors for permissions for possible release (this might be actually the biggest challenge.), but there is some issues which are rather hard to sort out.

Unlike MotorFX's Nords, this one has separated garages from the pits and entrance from garages goes via tunnel under the start line.

In quick race mode with AI, sometimes (not in every time) game crashes totally around 1-2 minutes after entering garage. Usually few AI cars get to the track for qualifying, before the whole game just locks up and task manager says that GT Legends is not responding. There's no information about the crash in trace file. I have come in conclusion that there's something very wrong with some of the garages. The PITS section has 24 entries (0-23), but only 2 garage spots per entry. Is it possible that GTL needs always 3 garages per TeamIndex?

Garages seem to show up nice and correctly in aiw-cam editor, but sometimes when starting quick race, there's 1 to 3 cars floating in space (and based on visible part of the floating track, they are no where near garages). And now when I think of it, They could be located in track center. So when does the game places garages to 0,0,0? When it runs out of real garage spots?

It also confuses me that the game crash seems not to be related those cars in origo. More like it is more prone to crash when all cars have been successfully located to correct garages. However, when it does not crash, everything works really beautifully. AIW-file seems to be well made and even AI runs very well on the track.

To figure out if it is really 0,0,0 where the lost cars end up you could put a plane at 0,0,-1 - when they fall onto the plane instead of the abyss you know.

Great project! I always wondered why this of all tracks is missing from the incredibly long list of available tracks. Good luck and I hope you can sort out the bugs. And then drive the marathon de la route .

CY33 wrote:
To figure out if it is really 0,0,0 where the lost cars end up you could put a plane at 0,0,-1 - when they fall onto the plane instead of the abyss you know.

Great project! I always wondered why this of all tracks is missing from the incredibly long list of available tracks. Good luck and I hope you can sort out the bugs. And then drive the marathon de la route .

Great ideas solving problems, I will test setting the plane in origo. thanks.
Marathon de la route is exactly the reason why I decided to give a try to converting this.

Thank you master builders

CasparGTL wrote:
Thank you master builders

I am completely newbie in GTL Track editing. CY-33 and others have about decade more experience than me.

I was scared to start this project (as I don't want to screw this up) and I asked Uwe / DerDumeklemmer, but he was too busy, so eventually I decided to give a try and if it would look like failure, then just scrap it without telling anyone.

Now everything seems to be working fine in this track (big thanks to CY-33 helping me with this by giving hints where to look), but I will fine tune cameras, pitboxes and some AIW parameters to get the AI work nicely.

A newbie andc then taking on complete Nuerburgring? Hero! And great that CY helps you!

Ohhhh don't expect to much from me here! I'm good with 3D models and textures, but complete noob with AI and such!

It will work out fine. With a little help from your friends

Sooo... anyone wants to see early progress video?

I like watching videos!

Here you go. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r6ZCBMOFjQ

EDIT: This is AI driving, so that you'll see how that works.

Last 4 days I have been editing the shadows (about 20 hours used) and they still need some work. There's two places where fps drops a bit too much, but that's due my dynamic shadows fps tests and I think I can pull those numbers up pretty easily when I have fixed other small things. This all takes a lot of time as the track has a lot of objects.

It seems that Dynamic Texture Shadows are the way to go with nowadays hardware. There's so much fill rate and graphics memory in nowadays cards that it would be complete waste not to use it. Also, as the dynamic shadow textures are rendered by gfx card itself before the main frame, they only consume graphics memory from the card, so there's no problems with 4gb limit.

the fraps fps in video is bit lower than what it is in game when there's no video capture (done with Geforce Hardware capture, not with the fraps though) going on. I do have everything maxed out at 2560x1440 and with Level 4 Anti-aliasing, so I am doing tests rather extreme settings here.

Just Wow the layout of the track looks great

Glück auf!

Even on mobile phone......WOW!!!!!

Can't wait for ETCC 8h at the total layout...

WOW, can't wait for it!

Thanks guys. There' still lot to do though.

CasparGTL wrote:
Can't wait for ETCC 8h at the total layout...
My target for finishing 1.0 version is somewhere late July as the NoGrip Legacy HTC Championship will use this layout for 1/20th of Marathon De La Route in 21st of August. Meaning that race will run for 4 hours and 18 minutes. Not only I have always wanted to host long race, but also two last years we ran 1970 Nords as Nürburgring 500kms and that took three and half hours, which was nice and went ok, except some racers said "Surprisingly that was not that bad..." which of course calls for longer race.

(and if someone wonders how we have been able to run races longer than 3 hours or how I am going to make the race time based instead of lap based, I found way doing both 2 years ago. Only thing needed is making new variation of the track with modified gdb file. If someone is truly interested about the trick and how it is made, just ask via PM. )

The biggest challenge is reach the original authors of the original rFactor track: Nick303 (Südschleife) and Motorfx (Nordschleife), then merged and improved by Kackbratze. Does anyone have the contact information for these guys? if you have, could you tell them about this project, ask them to watch the video and ask if they would grant permission to me about releasing this track, please?

If I can't reach the original authors, then this will be used only for the NoGrip Legacy HTC. If original authors are reached, but they deny releasing this, then it will stay only on my own HDD, so please help me with this.

EDIT:
Here's the link for the NoGrip Legacy HTC Championship, if someone got interested: https://www.simracing.org.uk/smf/index.php? topic=24772.0

Greatgreatgreat!

Hi everyone,
As some you noticed, I did not were able to make the track to release version before August, as we did run Marathon De La Route 4hours 18 minutes race on betaversion of the track. So, the beta version works already so that you can run it online as well as single player.

However I am still working on it and this week I fixed some AI pitting problems by moving the pitboxes and making them span to longer distance from each other.

Track has one annoying flaw: on the furthest point of the Südschleife, the headlights turns off. they first start to blink and then they go off for a moment. I am not sure about the reason for this, but I think it is due the distance from center point (origo) of the track. Track model itself is not correctly centered, probably because Nordschleife has been used as starting point and Südschleife then fused to it, so South loop takes quite far away from the center.

So has anyone ever moved the whole track, or has anyone ever re-centered track? The 3d model is huge but 3dsimed should be able to move that, but how about moving / centering the AIW, CAM and other data?

I have a plan how to do this, but as it needs some my own tools and coding them, it is rather tedious thing to do. Especially when I am not sure if it fixes the problem. So I am asking if someone has done this already?

If and when I get things sorted, I want to do Südschleife, Nordschleife and Betonschleife layouts as well. I downloaded the original rFactor version and that basic AIW done for all of these, so it is more or less fusing everything together. But that's still quite far away.

CY-33: If you read this, Sorry being so quiet so long, it has been a hectic. Now there is few other guys as well asking for Isuzu templates as well, so I am hoping to upload them on friday.

Hi nappe1,
this sounds like an interesting project.
I am quite familiar with internal AIW information / structure and have already checked and corrected some track AIWs for Uwe, especially the cut warnings and pit positions.
You asked for support regarding ‘moving / centering the AIW, CAM and other data’.
Everything in these files is based on x, y, z (or x, z, y!) coordinate system. To recenter a track, I recommend to define an offset for x, y, z and rewrite the values into the GRID, PIT and WAYPOINT sections.
You just need to know, which lines need the offset. For example wp_pos=yes and wp_width=no.
I have my own tool to analyze the AIW and can do this change easily (I hope ).
But I am NOT able to move the graphic elements!

I don’t know the CAM file structure, but it should be similar. I will check in general.
If you like, you will get a PM with my email account to send the AIW and CAM files to me.

Regards,
dikl

P.S. I have to get again a key from Dave for my new laptop. The old one with 3DSimEd is gone.

As i was participant in the Marathon de la Route i can assure you Nappe has made a great job. The circuit is great with few things needs to be done yet.

dikl wrote:
Hi nappe1,
this sounds like an interesting project.
I am quite familiar with internal AIW information / structure and have already checked and corrected some track AIWs for Uwe, especially the cut warnings and pit positions.
You asked for support regarding ‘moving / centering the AIW, CAM and other data’.
Everything in these files is based on x, y, z (or x, z, y!) coordinate system. To recenter a track, I recommend to define an offset for x, y, z and rewrite the values into the GRID, PIT and WAYPOINT sections.
You just need to know, which lines need the offset. For example wp_pos=yes and wp_width=no.
I have my own tool to analyze the AIW and can do this change easily (I hope ).
But I am NOT able to move the graphic elements!

I don’t know the CAM file structure, but it should be similar. I will check in general.
If you like, you will get a PM with my email account to send the AIW and CAM files to me.

Regards,
dikl

P.S. I have to get again a key from Dave for my new laptop. The old one with 3DSimEd is gone.

Hi,
thanks for your message. moving by Offset was my plan and as I don't know any tools in which aiw and cam data could be moved, I had a plan coding a one, but it's great news if you can do that.

Cam data is pretty straight forward. The structure of individual camera contains location (x,y,z) and all the other info is related to that IIRC. I did new cameras to Südschleife part as they were missing so learned a bit about format there.

I will do some tests with moving just the 3D model so that I get that right and I will contact you via PM / email / discord about sending the files for you.

Great to have you helping me with this.

This project continues again and I was able to correct the headlights problem. It was due to track being mis-centered.


Big thanks Dikl for support and information which helped me to make small program to move the aiw data.

The cam file however was not as easy as the game engine makers have decided to use different coordinate system for replay cameras, but I was able to crack that as well so now I have fully working 1970 Gesamtstrecke running.

I will release the small tool which allows moving aiw and cam data in xyz axis offsets. I also shared the knowledge of the camera file differences with Dikl so that not everything and everyone has to learn all the stuff by the hard way.

The track mesh for Südschleife was originally done with just 4 objects, So while trying to fix the lights, I already took the 2 very very long track sections and splitted them shorter parts. While doing that, I noticed some weird stuff in mesh, like polys that someone obviously would have wanted to delete, but had decided to squash them between two others so that there's no polygon face at all.. So I did my best to fix those as well.


What next?

- There's two problems with track surface mesh objects (Caused my previous work) so I will fix those first.

- After that I will Re-organize the folder structure and making / converting / importing Betonschleife, Nordschleife and Südschleife variations.

- The scenery in Südschleife seems to be wrong or based on much earlier time than my 1970 target, so I found some maps, images and videos from correct period and I am looking in to modeling more accurate (or at least different) scenery. Not sure how this goes so most likely first public version will not incorporate this.

Thank you Dr. Livingstone and friends, you are the best.

Now there's two layouts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUoewOR65KE

After this I have done quite bit work to scenery of the Nordkehre, but there is still lot to do. For example I noticed some differencies in pit wall location to pictures I have from the 1970's and that should be easy to fix. However back straight missing TOTAL tower and ground spectator places (instead of real grand stand) might need a bit more work.

However Dikl gets his hands on this (hopefully) soon as the track surface is soon in state that it won't be changed, so the AIW can be editted with out fear that track width, location or other spec would suddenly change.

Later on Südschleife and Nordschleife layouts will be converted from original rfactor version as well.