A call to Arms!

Dear GPx Drivers.
I love and loved all GPx games, and played all of them at least sometime. I love every single game of it. Not a single other Simulation has given me that much fun as GPx did. Noone was able to give me the great AI, a cool weather engine, and the incredible felling of driving a F1 car, as much as GPx did.

And I'm desperate.

I tried to play GP4 on my new Machine. It is way fast enough to cope with the game. Performance is not the problem. But the game is horribly unstable. But I LOVE it. Gp4 gives me so much atmosphere.

But I want to play it!

I'm calling all the modders and utility developers to something that might be a crazy, if not futile enterprise. Do decompile/disassemble and extract the best things out of this game.
Naming:
- The AI
- The Weather System
- The Physics

and sod the rest! THe rest can be easily remade with common tools and programming languages.
Again, it might be futile. As far as i can tell all the tools just "played" with variables in the game, but the developers of those are the experts who know the most of GPx.exes

I know I can still play GP3 2000, but i'll always look against those ugly gfx, incorrect tracks... and so on.
I can help with this. I'm studying computer science. I just want this game back.

I wish that was possible

F1Champs.net - F1 Manager Game (WIP)

A LOT of effort is needed. I can't even programm in OpenGL, so somebody capable of this would be a great help......

i dont think theres anyone that can do these things. In gaming communities like Quake and other first person shooters, the players are complete nerds and can do anything with computers and know how to program, so they can do things like this to their favourite game. In gp4 gaming, its more dorks then nerds, so unfortunantly none of them can do this for you. the only person that might be able to do anything is the guy who makes the 3d builder to edit tracks.

if i was you i'd rather have a look at why gp4 is instable than thinking of programming a new game

---

used to be GPGSL's Nick Heidfeld

the only person that might be able to do anything is the guy who makes the 3d builder to edit tracks.
I wonder who he is but I'm sure he can't :D

Anyway, GP4 is a DirectX game, so no need to know OpenGL.
C++ indeep knowledge sounds necessary indeed.

n00binio schrieb:
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> if i was you i'd rather have a look at why gp4 is
> instable than thinking of programming a new game


and do what? write a patch?
i think this is even more difficult to patch a programm. i don't even know if the disassembled code will compile...

how is it possible to decompile the code?

I know some programminglanguages, but never heard from a method that delivers you the source-code of a released program

F1Champs.net - F1 Manager Game (WIP)

n00binio Wrote:
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> if i was you i'd rather have a look at why gp4 is
> instable than thinking of programming a new game


INDEED...


________WELCOME BACK SCHUMMY!!________

you don't really decompile it.
the technique is called disassembling. Disassembling means you "translate" the bytecoded instructions to some form of human readable language called assembler. assembler is specific to processors and architectures(e.g. your x86 PC from intel or amd).
it is still hard to read, if not impossible. if you analyse the assembler code, you often have to know the state of e.g. your system memory.
and just to give u a taste of the readability of asm:

:00401000 55 push ebp
:00401001 83EC20 sub esp, 020
:00401004 8BEC mov ebp, esp
:00401006 668BF8 mov di, ax
:00401009 668BF2 mov si, dx
:0040100C 51 push ecx
:0040100D 56 push esi
:0040100E 66F7C6FFFF test si, FFFF
:00401013 790A jns 0040101F
:00401015 66F7D6 not si
:00401018 66F7DF neg di
:0040101B 7502 jne 0040101F
:0040101D 6646 inc si

the first lines of GP4 startup code.

Making a 300 lines assembler program in university was confusing enough (although fun in a dorky way), GP4 would probably have hundreds of thousands of lines like that.

It'd be absolutely fantastic if someone managed to take GP4's AI and transported it to rFactor, but that's pretty much impossible.

You should look at what's causing your crashes instead. I remember my GP4 crashing all over the place until I figured out thanks to this forum that it was the soundcard drivers.

paranoik0 schreef:
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> It'd be absolutely fantastic if someone managed to
> take GP4's AI and transported it to rFactor, but
> that's pretty much impossible.

I agree whit that, because our great GP4 AI whould let the crappy rFactor game crash till it dies

---

rFactor is a far more immersive sim than GP4, and far superior in many areas (cars and tracks lineup, physics, force feedback when with Real Feel, modding support, online code, etc etc etc). It's just a shame that it can only be enjoyed in online leagues and lonely hotlapping sessions, that's why it'd be near perfect if it had the AI (and the weather) of GP4.

Proposing a different approach:
This is a more "scientific" and yet a more doable approach.
Someone once said: Science is getting the rules of a chesse game, while not knowing it initially, by watching chess games over and over again.

So we could try out the following. Watch the AI, watch what they are doing. Then try to rebuild them.

We can investigate the telemetric data. see how those parametres behave. and so on and so on

But then what? Nobody is going to build a new full game for free, and even if they try they'll never have the resources to have it anywhere near complete enough in comparison to the other sims out there. AI for other games, even the very moddable rFactor isn't very flexible to edit.

I'm sorry, but this thread is nothing but a daydream.

I don't have the time atm to try it myself

but couldn't this do the trick? [programmerstools.org]

never knew those things existed, but it's worth trying

F1Champs.net - F1 Manager Game (WIP)

hardly on topic i know but does anyone know if ISI are doing anything with regards to an rFactor sequel?

loque Wrote:
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> hardly on topic i know but does anyone know if ISI
> are doing anything with regards to an rFactor
> sequel?


They are, it's been well known for quite some time that they're working on it, and there's been some articles and interviews about it.