@ohyeah2389 Would it be possible to add a field in MEB export settings that would allow to manually set the culling sphere radius? I have a massive track and the terrain is split into multiple meshes. Those close to the roads have high poly density and due to madness engine vertex count restrictions, I've spitted it into much smaller chunks and the culling is more aggressive. I currently just add an extra poly far away from the mesh to trick it into producing a bigger sphere radius, but would be nice if we could do it through the toolset.
The roads layout of the track I'm making. It's a trip around a lake and includes some fast sections, lots of winding roads, an imaginary bridge which crosses part of the lake, and a mountainous chunk. Doing the tedious thing of sculpting the terrain on the road sides Would love to see what everyone works on!
Wooow! Personally I am not workig on anything (yet?), but in case someone has the skills and the time and donesn't know where to start.... We need more ovals
Well, I put my first track model into the game... Very low res screenshot because in this moment I am using a laptop not capable of running the game properly, haha. It was actualy easier than I thought... And the tools work as a charm using GNU/Linux.
Did you find any part of the initial process to be too confusing, too unorthodox ("there must be a better way to do X step"/"it would be easier if I could do Y for this step instead of X"), or too complicated for what you think would be required? I'm trying to discover any ways in which I could improve the workflow, focusing now on the initial steps (as no one is yet as experienced with using the toolkit as I am, so we can't discuss more advanced stuff with confidence yet).
I don't know if this is intentional, but if you set a .dds file as a shader parameter (EPT_TEXTURE type) and later uncheck it, the scene exporter still copies the texture to the textures folder. Nothing major, you just have to use the clear button of the file path.
I've been stuck for 2 days, have done countless tests and everything I could think off, but I can't seem to debug this: I have a working version of my track and its associated .blend file. I can reliably export the scene, pack it, and it works every single time. Now if I go and add even a simple mesh (a cube or a plane) and assign a known to be working material/shader configuration, the game gets stuck on the track loading screen (at about 1/3 of the loading bar. Have observed that problematic visual objects usually stuck there). Things I've tried among others: Tried well known shaders like rz_basic and new_ground Used textures from the example project instead of mine Copied shader parameters from the example project Made sure there were no extra vertex attributes or custom normals Placed the mesh closer to the origin (track is big, was initially far away) Changed track filenames (including the object names in Blender) to Uppercase Tried with/without UV compression Checked for correct face normals Moved the object out of nested collections (shouldn't matter but still) Deleting the object (and its meb + mtx) and re-exporting, makes the track load fine. @ohyeah2389 I know it's hard to debug such a thing and there's still the possibility I'm missing something very obvious (most likely!). I'd hate to waste your time but if you feel you can give this a go, I could send the .blend file, textures, and the track folder structure with all the placeholder files. Or I'd appreciate if you can share some tips of where I could start looking to tackle this.
I've been having a similar issue with my Mid-Ohio model, and it's mainly why I haven't released an update for it yet. There seems to be some form of race condition being triggered for certain counts of materials/meshes, and where that line is is not well defined. I have no idea how to fix this and I don't know exactly what's causing it, nor do I have any ideas of what could be happening; we obviously don't have the tools to debug what's actually going wrong in the loading process that's triggering this freeze. To be more specific, when I try to use more than 16 materials on Mid-Ohio, the freeze occurs, which is strange because G&J successfully uses 23 materials without issue. So we can have more statistics on this, please do the following: - Flush your template folder by deleting the MEBs and MTXs from the Tracks/TrackName folder - Perform a scene export of the known working configuration - Count the number of resultant MEB and MTX files in the template Tracks/TrackName folder and post those counts here The latest working config of G&J has 156 MEBs and 23 MTXs. The latest working config (more advanced than the latest public release) of Mid-Ohio has 146 MEBs and 16 MTXs. Also, as a workaround, try setting up the new mesh as part of a combine group with an existing mesh, and see if it loads successfully.
Thanks for the quick reply! (and even if it's bad news, at least I'm happy I'm not alone in this ) Here's my findings. Working version of my track has: MEB = 33, MTX = 5 Visual meshes (before deduplication, as Blender stats show) - vertices = 902.489, triangles = 1.669.601 If you want me to also get the vertex count of the phys/SMS/trigger meshes please say so. I also did some object combining tests with an existing (A) and the new offending (B) object. Both assigned A's material-> Track loads and renders them successfully A kept it's original material, B assigned an existing material from another object -> Track loads and renders them successfully A kept it's original material, B assigned a newly created material -> Track fails to load Unfortunately most of my 33 objects are close to the limit of 65k vertex count, and that is only the terrain, roads, and roadlines! I was about to start placing foliage, posts, signs, etc, but I'll put it on ice for the time being. Thanks for your help and I hope we discover what tricks the engine plays. If you need any beta testing or want me to try anything feel free to ask!
Has anyone found a way to get working billboard trees? (the ones that rotate to always face the camera). I manged to get a mesh rendered with the "basic_billboard_trees" shader but it only shows at very certain camera angles, it doesn't rotate with the view, and beyond those certain angles it disappears.
Just FYI for anyone, whose track isn't loading, try and delete unused files before packing the track. What I mean is for example your track uses objects A, B and C. For whatever reason you decide object B is no longer of use so you hide/delete it from your blender file. When packing up the track via the PackTrack.exe, it will also pack the mtx and meb files leftover from the previous export, where you had object B. This causes the track not to load (gets stuck at 1/3 of the way).
v0.2.0 has been released: https://github.com/ohyeah2389/Open-Madness-Track-Tools/releases/tag/v0.2.0 It contains fixes to issues mentioned by @VirusGR42 @immortalx and others, as well as quality-of-life improvements and fixes for certain loading hangs.
