*****GP4 Track editing - The new thread*****

tnx for clearing thaat up thomas, i didn;t really know what massive red line ment :P

On the 1500 sector limit, i dont really know, its something i found out last week, you should ask lo2k, but ik can tell you for 90% sure its a gp4 limit.

Too bad, coz' Spa is approx. 1400 sectors long.

1500 is not enough to create a big track.

@Lo2k:
You should have mentioned that limit somewhere in your user guide.
It's just soooo frustrating to create 90% of a track (with correct banks, elevation, banking, etc...) and then find out that you can't finish it because it's too long.

It's a 3DEditor limit as I explained it in the error message: "1500 sector 3DEditor's limit".

At 3deditor creation I had to fix a size for the array storing sectors, so I checked every treack to be sure all original tracks could be read safe.
But now that we can create new sectors, I was waiting somewhat ask me about that limit to extend it.
The .dat format in itself is flexible enough to store 65535 sectors (as I said before which means a 320km long track !) but I don't know if GP4 could handle such long tracks.

this will clarify the question.

convention:
n.o.s. number of sectors

gp4.exe 1.02

.text:00554503 stc
.text:00554504 call sub_557587
.text:00554509 push esi
.text:0055450A mov ax,Number_of_sectors (recover n.o.s. from readed .dat)
.text:00554510 sub ax, 1 (subtract 1)
.text:00554514 mov word_868558, ax (store n.o.s)
.text:0055451A shr ax, 5 (logical shift n.o.s. with 5)
.text:0055451E mov word_868556, ax (store shifted n.o.s.)
.text:00554524 cmp ax, 32h (cmp shifted value with 32hex)
.text:00554528 jle short loc_55452B (if less then jump)
.text:0055452A int 3 (otherwise crash the game)
.text:0055452B

according to this code the max n.o.s. will be 1616, how? 650(hex) rshifted by 5 = 32(hex)


Lo2k, what about the new version? i visit this forum and your site 10 times at day
hours,days or weeks??





Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/30/2005 09:34PM by shutt1e.

>>>The .dat format in itself is flexible enough to store 65535 sectors (as I
>>>said before which means a 320km long track !)

Something like a 25 km limit would be nice. That would allow a crazy track-maker to build the old Nurburgring.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/30/2005 09:14PM by Tom2681.

Nice shutt1e, so current limit should be 1616 sectors but if you found the code location, that mean we could change this limit to something higher (not sure rest of GP4 code could handle more sectors anyway...)

Release date is still 2-3 days ahead as I got some familly home and thus I can't spend usual time to 3deditor.
So at best I think it could be ready for saturday 23h59

>>I think it could be ready for saturday 23h59

I'll be waiting with my trackmaps, aspirin (for cc-line modeling) and beer.

Tom2681 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> >>I think it could be ready for saturday
> 23h59
>
> I'll be waiting with my trackmaps, aspirin (for
> cc-line modeling) and beer.

and some ciggyes...

@lo2k
well, about the code, i've find this in 5 mins, dunno if there are other places with a similar code, can you try to make a track with more than 1616 sectors? (with a special version of 3de and maybe not in a hurry) even a big oval could be fine, then a patch in gp4.exe can tell if this is the only limit.
the better place to patch the code is the
shr ax,5 to be replaced with a shr ax,7 (this more than twice the sectors limit)

I'm surprised that EVERY track I make works in-game !

I've just created in 4 hours a miniature version (1498 sectors) of the old Ring complete with the Flugplatz jump and the Karussel (Check out the Screenshots thread (middle and bottom of page 34)) and it all works.

It seems that the possibilities are endless.





Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/01/2005 06:09AM by Tom2681.

Tom2681 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I'm surprised that EVERY track I make works
> in-game !
>
> I've just created in 4 hours a miniature version
> (1498 sectors) of the old Ring complete with the
> Flugplatz jump and the Karussel (Check out the
> Screenshots thread (middle and bottom of page 34))
> and it all works.
>
> It seems that the possibilities are endless.
>

great stuff tom - Lo2k is a genius so i dont get surprised when everything works anymore :p

i sure hope we get to see some of these traks - in what ever state. maybe you should put them online discreetly?
have you thought yet about objects & textures?




____
Tony

Nah, not yet. I'm still learning.

But I won't be going anywhere during the summer, so I'll have all the time in the world to focus on track-editing.

i think i'm pretty much done with the run-off areas in this corner... now i have to fix those height differences the track still has :P

---

I'm against sigpics

Thanks Shutt1e, I will try it in a minute

@Tom: Terrific track !

@Paco: Nice

Hmm, I tried with a 2361 sectors oval but whatever my attempts (shr'd by 7 or cmp to 64h), GP4 always show a popup saying 'bad file type'...

If you want to try, Shutt1e, you can grab the test .dat here.

ok, expect a report late this evening.

no problem, I've still some work ahead

great effort tom, especially like the pics in the screenshots thread, 6 months ago anyone who thought of the nordschleife for gp4 would have been shot on the spot!

guys, if any of you have pics (or videos) of the hungaroring (mainly turn 1 and 12, new layout), i'd appreciate if you post them here, pics, links, anything...

thank you

---

I'm against sigpics

Lo2k Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hmm, I tried with a 2361 sectors oval but whatever
> my attempts (shr'd by 7 or cmp to 64h), GP4 always
> show a popup saying 'bad file type'...
>
> If you want to try, Shutt1e, you can grab the test
> .dat here.
>
>

are you sure this is a valid track? the cc-line has the initial section but all values are at 0.
i've find a couple of places in the code where some other limits are set, but i fail loading the track, the game read strange data from this dat, so it crashes when run some SAR asm instructions (arithmetic shift operation) with wrong data.
the patched exe can read a standard track but not this.

text:00536A7B call sub_54D0AC
.text:00536A80 mov edi, dword_8914E8
.text:00536A86 mov ecx, 30D40h (this set another limit- 200.000 bytes??)
.text:00536A8B call sub_5364C5 (here the dat is loaded)
.text:00536A90 jb short loc_536ABA (if something is wrong you get the "bad file type" error)

@Paco:

>>if any of you have pics (or videos) of the hungaroring
>> (mainly turn 1 and 12, new layout),
>>i'd appreciate if you post them here

I've uploaded MSC's 2004 pole lap on Rapidshare:

[rapidshare.de]

I hope it's the kind of stuff you're looking for.