527 replies to this topic

[Tidge]

I have downloaded sciss.exe previously but it is inoperative. The program doesn't even start,  " Microsoft error" !!

[pirenzo]

The program doesn't 'start' per se.  
You need to just drag and drop mytrack.3do onto the icon and it should produce a command window for a split second and then a new file appears in explorer shortly.

If you don't get sciss to work, just keep checking everything.  trk, 3dos, ini, and whatever mips that are necessary at the very minimum.

[Tidge]

I have :  grand.3do, horiz.3do, and mytrack.3do  that's it.

I think I have all the MIPs

and I do have a mytrack.trk

[dangermouse]

Oops - too late  

Edited by dangermouse, Dec 08 2007 - 06:10 PM.

[pirenzo]

Try deleting the grandstand from your TSO temporarily, recompiling the track and trying again.

[Tidge]

pirenzo, on Dec 8 2007, 08:07 PM, said:

Try deleting the grandstand from your TSO temporarily, recompiling the track and trying again.

      

Success !!!  I got sciss.exe to work and found I was missing several MIPs.  I searched for them and put them in the track folder and Voila,  a boring oval, but the most beautiful oval I have ever driven !!

I can't thank you guys enough for helping me through this, I know it was time consuming but I really appreciate it.  I have made a backup of mytrack and now it's time to start playing !!  Can't wait !

Thanks again for all your help !!

[Tidge]

Tidge, on Dec 8 2007, 08:41 PM, said:

pirenzo, on Dec 8 2007, 08:07 PM, said:

Try deleting the grandstand from your TSO temporarily, recompiling the track and trying again.

      

Success !!!  I got sciss.exe to work and found I was missing several MIPs.  I searched for them and put them in the track folder and Voila,  a boring oval, but the most beautiful oval I have ever driven !!

I can't thank you guys enough for helping me through this, I know it was time consuming but I really appreciate it.  I have made a backup of mytrack and now it's time to start playing !!  Can't wait !

Thanks again for all your help !!

For anyone who is following this thread, and having a similar problem with the tutorial, feel free to PM me and I will send you my "mytrack" folder (9.76 meg) so you will have a working track to learn track building from.

Thanks again to this whole community and special thanks to Pirenzo and Ginetto.

[pirenzo]

Well done Tidge!   Glad to be of help.

[ginetto]

Great Tidge

[Tidge]

Ginetto, on Dec 9 2007, 07:59 PM, said:

Great Tidge

Hey guys, I'm back     I have been through all 3 parts of the "Track Making with Lou"  tutorial, which BTW was very good.  I have selected a track and found a great interactive view from Google Earth from which to obtain the altitude info.  I have a completed .GTK with all gaps zeroed and constructed a 60s style pitlane, (no concrete wall), like Kyalami.  This is where Lou runs out of material, I have even emailed Lou and he seemed interested in helping, but I thought I would ask you guys as well, as I haven't heard from him in over a week. There are no more parts in the back issues and didn't really get an answer as to whether there are more parts or not. I think the next step should be to edit the altitudes.  This is somewhat implied by the GPLEA Tutorial but that seems a bit outdated.

It talks of using the spreadsheet for altitude editing but there don't seem to be any links to GTK2xls or xls2GTK.

I have tried using GTKalt on the "mytrack" created earlier, and when I try to save as a .gta I get this error:

:Access violation at address 0040A168 in module 'gtkalt.exe', Read of address 00000010.

If I try to "Export" to GTK and then compile, the changes don't take effect.

Is GTKalt the altitude editor of choice ?

Edited by Tidge, Mar 22 2008 - 08:01 AM.

[ginetto]

My choice is gracED
Read well the readme file
You will use it together with txt2gtk which copies paste the heights back and forward to the gtk.
You can zoom a lot in graced so you can refine very well all the heights  and give a personality to your track

For what I reacall, to make gtkalt work, you need a pic in the working directory, or something like that...

A good use of both of them should be to assing cambers with gtkalt (it gives to all the traces the camber angle you want) and after start using gracED (wich is only graphical so is harder to give the right camber angle, but not impossible ).

There is a new tool HeightED, developed by electricman on the base of gracED, wich should give good performance but I didn't try it very well, so I can't tell if you'll work faster with this one

Edited by Ginetto, Mar 22 2008 - 01:41 PM.

[Tidge]

Thank you Ginetto, for the links and the insights.


The final link to gracED v0.96 from a post by norup is dead

[Bill]

It is not the 96 version but it its close
it is HERE

[S.Beuchert]

Bill, on Mar 23 2008, 01:32 PM, said:

It is not the 96 version but it its close
it is HERE

added V.096 to Bill's thread

[Tidge]

Ginetto, on Mar 22 2008, 03:38 PM, said:

My choice is gracED
Read well the readme file
You will use it together with txt2gtk which copies paste the heights back and forward to the gtk.
You can zoom a lot in graced so you can refine very well all the heights  and give a personality to your track

For what I reacall, to make gtkalt work, you need a pic in the working directory, or something like that...

A good use of both of them should be to assing cambers with gtkalt (it gives to all the traces the camber angle you want) and after start using gracED (wich is only graphical so is harder to give the right camber angle, but not impossible ).

There is a new tool HeightED, developed by electricman on the base of gracED, wich should give good performance but I didn't try it very well, so I can't tell if you'll work faster with this one

I now have gracED working and have gone all the way around my track and created  "altref.tex" using information from Google Earth.  But before I edit the altitudes I would like to "compile" the track first and see if I can drive on it while it is still flat.  

When I try to compile, I get the dreaded "Access violation" for trk23doz.exe.  But it tells me the proper .gtk information and the runtime messages tell me the track extents and that :

ini file loaded
texture list loaded
.fb loaded
section lookup calculated
VisList generated.
  

What's missing ?

[Tidge]

Nevermind,  I found my own problem.  

[ginetto]

Good you solved it

About elevations, I found useful to keep the txt files created by graced at every change.

As an example, I set the name for the input as fiorano.txt and for the output as new_fiorano.txt.
When I go to change the elevations again, I renane fiorano.txt into a progressive fiorano.txt1 and then take out the new_  part to the new file. This way, if I change something that doesn't satisfy me , I can always go back to any point of the elevation setting.

Hope it make sense to anybody besides me

Edited by Ginetto, Mar 30 2008 - 04:42 AM.

[Tidge]

Great tip, Thanks for that  Ginetto.      

[Luis Babboni]

ferraif40, on Nov 5 2007, 05:40 AM, said:

Hi

Bassically how do you make a track for GPL 1998?

Jon

Hi friends,

Im new in this affair. Tidge help me in this moments.
A question:
Wich is an acceptable gap when you join the last with the first sections to avoid the risk of freezes or jumps to the desktop?
10cm; 1cm; 1mm; 0mm ?

Thanks,
Luis.

[Saiph]

José Raúl Capanegra, on Feb 14 2009, 11:50 PM, said:

............
Wich is an acceptable gap when you join the last with the first sections to avoid the risk of freezes or jumps to the desktop?
10cm; 1cm; 1mm; 0mm ?

You should always try to get a perfect match at the start/finish line. If you have a small gap, even 1mm, then GPL will crash at some point when you drive the track. The GPL physics engine "steps" the car forward in increments of one frame (usually 1/36th second), and if the reference point of the car happens to land on the gap at the end of a frame, GPL will crash. You might be lucky for 100 laps or more, and the car will "jump" the gap. But at some point your luck will run out.

I've just started to learn how to use the "GPLTrk" editor, and the first tricky problem I had was how to make the end of the track join up properly with the start/finish line. But the tutorial on the GPLEA website gives some good tips, and the editor itself tells you if you have any longitudinal gap, lateral gap, or orientation mismatch. On both the test tracks that I've created so far, I have managed to get all three errors down to zero. It does take a little juggling, sometimes you have to go back to the last corner on the circuit to make adjustments. But if you can get all the errors down to zero, then it's worth it.