New Pau circuit for GP4

This track is awesome. So tight and narrow. I love how it opens up at Turn 5 and Turn 6 before narrowing abruptly again at the square (Foch). For once,the chicane is also a great addition: very much of a stop-and-go feeling, but a very important one as the longest straight follows.

hi forum

as even after a call nobody seemed to care to inform me directly about their crashing pau tracks, I just went on with my own business
but then fortune somehow let crash my own installation too, and so I finally got a chance to debug my own track by my own

what I found is the following, though of course I'm not sure whether it was the same in all your cases.

seems like I missed to point out in the installation description, the importance of "either or".
either you install into the trackmanager of GPxPatch with the pau2013-files OR (exclusive or) you rename the files to some original tracknames and load WITHOUT the trackmanager, be it with pure gp4.exe or with GPxPatch and disabled/unchecked trackmanager. the reason for this is, the .dat-file includes some GP4Info (see CMagic-4 for more info about this), most of all the "prefix" pau2013. so if you use the GPxPatch-trackmanager to load the .dat, whatever name the latter has, the prefix is there and used, so eg pau2013.wad is wanted. if its not there, loading any session crashes "about at the middle of the bar". also pau2013.gp4 and pau2013.anm are wanted, crashing "at the end or the very end of the bar" ...

I also found another cause for crashes. here "quick race" always worked, but loading a "free practice"-session crashed "at the very end of the bar". and funny enough, ANY track crashed now !
what I found after a while, easywad somehow broke the file anim.wad. looks like if you alter an already included file, eg renaming it within easywad or overwrite it with a new file with the same name, and then hit "repair wad" (Slowwad), anim.wad breaks for practice sessions. sometimes I was able to repair the broken anim.wad again by clicking "Slowwad" (so it changes to "Fastwad" ) and then hitting "Repair wad", maybe I had to go twice. or remove the "offending" file first and then make, lets call it "fast wad repair", and insert the needed file again. in one test nothing seemed to help, and I had to take anim.wad from an original installation and insert the custom files again.
(of course I'm not complaining about easywad, far from it. it is IMHO a very cool tool for replacing files in a wad by drag&drop; on a sidenote, wadupdater is great and very useful also, in particular for its command line options)

I also checked the PO subject:
in my installation the hit is slightly higher as with original monaco, maybe 10% (eg 40 instead of 36 sitting on the grid at the back of the pack). maybe old news to some, but what I also found (found again, as I completely forgot it), beware the methode of measuring the PO-hit, as doing it with the regular "sky message" is the badest hit by itself. you may want to measure it with GPxPatch, GPxCInfo instead. place the PO item where you can see it while driving and watch your jaws drop to the floor once you see the rise of the PO-figure, when one of those messages like "addie walti is out of the race" appear in the sky ...
btw there are also other features of the gfx-options of gp4 that give a surprising PO hit.

and, some seem to be concerned about the number of scenes in a .gp4-file. here I also made a test and compared three pau tracks, the "original" with 11 scenes and a version, where I put everything including the track into a single scene (almost 59200 vertices, phew, lucky me) and a version with 2 scenes with about 29600 vertices each. the size of the .gp4 file decreased by 15KB/eliminated scene, from 3.610MB to 3.473MB or 3.490MB, but I was not able to notice any change in the PO outside the usual spread !?


maybe this is useful

regards, addie


ps
in the meantime I noticed an "error" in the pau2013.anm file. the way it is now it looks like the mechanics were watching the race at the pit wall before going to work when you pit, instead of playing cards in the back of the garage as usual. in other words, having 0 in the first figure, let them approach your car from the left, having 1 from the right. again, this is probably old news. I made a few tests here before publishing the track and didnt notice I had the wrong version packaged, sorry for that.
actually the proper pau2013.anm is a 1:1 copy of monaco2001.anm

and thanks turbo lover for bringing some bad reflections to my attention (and for the discussions) !

Thank you for your efforts addie. I am actually happy that you found a few bugs and shared this with us as we can all potentially learn something. The fact that you have been around building tracks for Geoff Crammond’s series GP2 and GP3 and now GP4 shows in your approach and your final product of custom tracks. I did not have a problem myself with the track so there was nothing to share in response to that.

Circuit de Pau / France is a fabulous work of 3D art backed by many years of technical knowledge. It’s obvious to me that you have applied great care time and effort in building this circuit. I truly hope that you will continue to enjoy building custom tracks for Grand Prix 4.

auscain Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> Circuit de Pau / France is a fabulous work of 3D
> art backed by many years of technical knowledge.
> It’s obvious to me that you have applied great
> care time and effort in building this circuit. I
> truly hope that you will continue to enjoy
> building custom tracks for Grand Prix 4.

I new to this type of track installation, and I maybe as thick as a brick I think I have followed the steps included in the pack and your post above, but it fails right at the last moment, could you put some dummy friendly instruction up please?.

Also on win 8, easy wad comes up with an illegal switch error, I have tried everything I have read, including xp compatibility and admin rights, but still the error. any thoughts



regards richard

Check your PM mate


richardparfitt63 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I new to this type of track installation, and I
> maybe as thick as a brick I think I have followed
> the steps included in the pack and your post
> above, but it fails right at the last moment,
> could you put some dummy friendly instruction up
> please?.
>
> Also on win 8, easy wad comes up with an illegal
> switch error, I have tried everything I have read,
> including xp compatibility and admin rights, but
> still the error. any thoughts
>
>
>
> regards richard

this just keeps crashing on me can you help me with some advice?

love the sound of your tcam view do you have a link to that sound pack?

boy do I feel like a dummy, I get it now open pau2013.wad with easywad (which by the way is now working for some reason) copy and paste pau2013.anm into the animationdata section. all works now, and boy is it a challenge, some setup tips would be nice? or is that asking too much. I'm glad I kept reading and trying new things, the only way to learn. thankyou to those that helped an to the hard work of all those that keep this game alive.

The engine sounds are from Briere's collection - Mercedes 2011 to be exact..

You can find lot of them at GPG downloads section!

hey hasbriale your sound pack has a flutter inbetween the gears and a nice back fire how do you get that?

hasbriale Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The engine sounds are from Briere's collection -
> Mercedes 2011 to be exact..
>
No, it's Mitsuro Sano's 2010 Mercedes

ok

wow thanks man it dosen't get any closer that this but were gettin there!

Err. My bad.. Thanks Mr. Sano and Mr. Briere..

richardparfitt63;

How did you get this to work?

Im still getting CTD at the end.

Ive opened up the Pau2013.wad with easywad, yet where is the animationdata section?

I thought anim data was a seperate wad all by itself and not in the track wad itself?

Thanks

Richardparfitt63;

How exactly did you get this to work, im still getting the CTD at the end?!

You wrote "copy and paste pau2013.anm into the animationdata section", but where is the animationdata section?

I thought animdata was in a seperate wad seperate from the track wad?

Thanks for any help.

Slasher.

@Alasher,it's in the anim wad, if i'm correct

Thanks for the reply quickslick.

Yep, inserted into the anim.wad, still getting CTD.

Is it possible you or someone could give me the exact sequence in which you installed this track?

Appreciated.

Slasher.

Are u still in trouble with adding Pau circuit, mate?
Are you using GpxPatch?
What's the exact problem?
___________________________________________________________________________
For a list of EVERY download for GP4, look here:[docs.google.com]