Gridder - liveries/AI/championships tool

Very cool! Looking forward to seeing this develop more!

 

Amazing progress

 

Following this, great start on it so far!

 

Really amazing job . Have you although abandoned?

 

Thanks - not abandoned, just too many projects plus real life going on. Will get back to it eventually.

 

No worries, looking forward to your return - the features and progress look to be a game changer when it’s finished.

 

A little more progress on this - now handles multiple skinpacks for the same series (e.g.install both IndyCar'95 and '96 packs, load presets from either to the game, or mix and match stuff from them to create new presets).

 

Not intending to drip-feed stuff here - just sharing some progress . Another thing added recently is the ability to add 'loose' liveries to Gridder's livery pool. So if you download or paint a random extra livery (i.e. that is not part of a skinpack), you can import it, add it to a preset and load it to the game without ever touching an xml file. I'm not getting into mod management here - just making it easier to add skins that maybe aren't part of coherent/ready-to-go packs.


Similarly, in addition to painting basic helmets - you can also import a helmet skin independently of a skinpack and assign it to a driver for use in a preset, and again load it to game without touching an xml file. As outlined previously, helmets are tied to the AI driver profile in Gridder, not the car livery - so you can swap drivers easily and their helmet goes with them (providing they have the right type of helmet for the series), and driver profiles can have as many helmet variants as you like.

 

Looks promising m8.

 

This is incredible to watch develop. If it wasn't for the possibility of mid-race saves, it would probably alone completely satisfy my every AMS2 need!

I have a proposal for the sin of drip-feeding..... every time you drip-feed, I press the winner button. Deal?

 

Very nice indeed

 

This looks super deep and thorough. How feasible would it be to have the program assign the AI drivers skill parameters from an imported results data?

For example take the 1990 British GP qualifying results, import them to the program and have it assign the appropriate skill ranges based on the results, same for the race. At least for the qualy, race pace and reliability.

I have 0 programming skills, so I dunno if I am making sense.

 

It makes sense, but tbh its probably beyond the scope of already scope-creeping project. Plus the "appropriate skill ranges" part of the suggestion is very subjective, so even if you had a clean/consistent data format to import and it handled the maths of it based on some plausible formula, it would probably be a bit questionable in terms of usefulness.

 

A bit more progress - this wasn't part of the original plan, but the introduction of the new BOP scalars prompted consideration of adding a screen for car-specific values. In Gridder, these are applied per car/livery (despite 'living' in the custom AI file) - so in the same way the helmets in Gridder stay with the driver, the BOP (and reliability) values stay with the car/livery regardless of the driver assigned.

This can be tweaked per-preset, so you can have race-specific BOP or evolving car performance through a season, etc.

Values below are just test data, not calibrated 1990 performance (though IMG will be working on an F1 1990 update to factor this stuff in at some point).