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Martijn and GPLEA proudly presents

Clermont-Ferrand

New track for GPL.

Ver. 1.0

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(c) 2000 -2004 GPLEA / Martijn Keizer / m.keizer@wanadoo.nl

Visit the GPLEA at http://www.gplea.org/

Content:

1. File content.

2. Instructions.

3. Credits.

4. Known Bugs

5. COPYRIGHT / PERMISSION

6. DISCLAIMER!

This zip-file contains a new track for GPL, Solitude. This track is

Martijn Keizer was responsable for the track layout, altitudes, object placements and some coordination things, and the replay lap :)

Phil Flack made those awesome, large Scenery objects as well as a bunch of smaller objects. He also created an amazing number of amazing editing tools during the construction of this track. He developed track-shading, track-colouring, groove routines, Gappy, animated objects, and the .WOB fileformat just for this project.

Fredde Nornemark put his mark on the atmosphere of the track by creating the grass, bush, asphalt and tree textures with the shading effects on it.

Svend Seegert stepped in late in the project, and created some fantastic textures, like the one you see on the horizon and the valley.

John Basara created the AI, so if you cant beat Clark, thats because he did his work too well.

Grand Prix Legends is copyrighted by Papyrus Design Studios and Sierra Sports.

I used many programs and tools during the creation of this track, and wish to thank the creators of these tools

Joachim Blum for the TRKcamEdit tool

Remco Moedt for TRK2TXT

Bill Gates for MS Excel and Notepad

Phil Flack for countless trk23dowxyz versions, mipman, racingline, srbman, rpyview, etcetc i cant remember them all!

Peter for GPLTRK

Many things in trackmaking are a compromise between fluid framerate, and the best possible looking track. For this reason, I sometimes had to make corners a little less smooth (you can see the angles in the corners), in order to keep the framerate neat. Also the scenery pop-ups you might see (especially when driving the wrong way around) are places with lower viewdistance, to save framerates a little.

These files are provided for your personal enjoyment. You are not allowed to publish them on any websites without the permission of the author. These files may not be put on a CD, or be sold for profit, or used for any commercial purpose. They may not be made to be a part of another program or distribution, without the permission of the author. This file must always be included.

You are kindly requested not to publish alternate texture versions for this track for at least 8 weeks after publication date, to encourage everyone to enjoy the original hard work that has been put into the textures.

The authors of this package take no responsibility for it's use.The contained files are provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied. This is not a Papyrus/Sierra product.

Bug reports and feedback are greatly appreciated!

Wow. Finally this thing has been released, when you read this. It took us a long time to finish this thing, i would never have thought it would take this long when i started the first version back in May of the year 2000. I went through 2 initial versions that were completely scrapped and started all over again after my visit to the real track in the summer of 2001. When i then created the track from scratch for the 3rd time, using some topographic and elevation maps, the track immediately felt right, that was great! The slopes might not be as steep this time around, but I know they are at the proper, realistic angle.

I remember very fondly the first testing sessions i had with Marc Mercer and others, when the track constituted of no more then a ribbon of tarmac with either a rockface or an abyss on the side. So much fun to push eachother in there! You should appreciate the trackside earthbanks when you run into them now, cause its a long way down without them!

So over time there were very large changes to the track. The actual tracksurface was not changed a lot, just some corners here and there. But the scenery is a different story alltogether. Due to the complex nature of the scenery around the track, and our desire not to take any shortcuts by just using a large Horizon file, it went from bad to worse. So over time i think Phil must have made 20 different versions of the Puy de Charade object!! We developed a lot more stuff that didnt quite make it to the track eventually due to constrains of framerate, or because we couldnt solve the clipping problems that happen nearly always when you try something outside of the regular book.

In the end i am very very happy that we have finally released this track. It took a long while, and i admit i was not working all my free waking hours on this track. There have been periods of many months during which there was no development at all, and then we would find a bit of motivation in a corner, triggered by a forum or chat question or just the desire to fire up GPL and choose a nice track to drive.

I am very sure that within a day after release someone will point out a big mistake somewhere on the track that gets me thinking "how on earth did i miss that the past 4 years", but you know thats how things go. We could have spend another week or month or year on it, and it would look nicer again then it does now. But you have to release it one time. So dont be surprised if there's an update somewhere in the future. Then again, dont be surprised either if there isnt.

I hope you will enjoy driving around the track as much as we enjoyed creating it.

Well. Must say I was a bit surprised when Martijn finally said "we're releasing it", but then I'm one of those people who never think things are finished and always want to change this, add that, tweak and twiddle bits and pieces. To have this project 'finished' (note the quotes) will be most welcome. Now we just have that other slow burner to get around to- JTRC ;o)

So what has making this track taught me? GPL is a *#@&* !! Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the coding achievements of the time, but oh boy does it take some effort to get clip free scenery in a track like this. I know it's not perfect, I don't think it ever will be with the GPL graphics engine :o(

May I take this opportunity to apologise to those who will suffer low framerates. All I can say is that this track was not designed for low-end machines. Sorry! Every object has been made (and re-made countless times, as the 2gb of design files on my machine will testify) as low-detailed as possible, but there's just so much in view it's an evil task. I hope it works on as many machines as possible, but I don't think we'll be seeing 20car AI races there ;o) Be glad I didn't get my way for the Puy de Charade object (the big momma in the middle of the track) - at one point it featured a nice Monkey Nuts HeadQuarters secret cave with missile silos. Um...ok, so I got a bit carried away with the modelling- it had more polygons that most of the original tracks!!

Some other things I'd like to say but can't construct into meaningful sentences:

* trk23do rocks. </trumpet mode>

* rpyview sucks. </reality mode> (but at least it works a bit)

* making animated objects is excellent fun in theory, but I don't have to make the textures!

* gappy is the greatest little hack Papyrus put into GPL

* 4 years development time is possibly a bit too long for a mere 5 miles!

* I still can't take that right-left-left as fast as Martijn. Grr...

* Hope you enjoy the easter-eggs :o)

Getting involved in this awsome longterm project even at a late stage, has for several reasons been a privilege - so thanks to those responsible for dragging me in. Among these privileges were:

Being able to drive the track !!!

Having the oportunity to work with Martijn and Phil. ( I still can't decide who of the two is the craziest. :o) )

Making the final textures has been a challenge, and in several ways some sort of balancing act. Balancing, because of the wellknown compromise between texture resolution and framerates, but also because there already were lots of nice, goodworking textures with lots of atmosphere - in other words, a certain "style" into which my contributions had to blend. This "blending-proces" has also included adjusting a minor part of the already made textures by Frede Nornemark a bit, to make ends meet, so to say. In general I think the blend is working very well, but stylistic inconsistencies, as well as things that could have been reworked with benefit, do appear - if you are looking for them.

Stuff for a future update could include work at the hills visible from the s/f straight, as well as other things that still springs to my eye, and "trainspotters" like myself might discover a couple of lacks in terms of "1965 authenticy" when it comes to adverts etc. That is mostly down to the fact that the amount of pics available increased relatively late in the proces, and having every registred 65 advert in it's right place before initial release, would probably mean releasing shortly before christmas 2012. :-)

Still, with a track made by someone who actually visited the place, making phototours, etc and with surroundings to a great extent not only painted, but 3do'ed, I would say that focus on authenticy is build into the project right from the start.

from http://www.silhouet.com/motorsport/tracks/charade.html