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DarkDog
Joined: 07 Sep 2004
Posts: 29
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 Posted: Wed Mar 16, 20:17 |
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Does any one have an overhead view of the Pikes Peak Hill Climb? a friend of mine and myself are in the middle of making an Xpand Rally Pikes Peak map but need a high resolution overhead view (ie satellite view) of Pikes Peak in order to make a good representation of the real mountain.
As well, if any one lives in the area of Pikes Peak and has a video camera, it would be very helpful to have a video of the whole trip from the starting line up to the peak. We have found a racing video called "Climb Dance" which is quite nice, but is cut to much to give us the full coverage we desire. If some one does not mind driving up the hill and capturing the view from the windshield straight ahead, that would be fantatsic. It would give us a great view of how the roads are slanted, trees, big rocks, other objects worth mentioning in order to properly place everything.
We already have a 24bit height map of the area, but need more details regarding colors, trees, and road shape in order to do this properly.
Thanks for the help if your able to!
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DDawg
Joined: 17 Apr 2004
Posts: 493
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| Posted: Wed Mar 16, 22:06 |
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www.terraserver-usa.com
type in [-105.04263] longitude, [38.83980] latitude
takes you to summit house .... from there its up to you how you use the info ...
_________________
If you can't run with the Big Dawg's, pour yourself a beer and relax on the porch!
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DarkDog
Joined: 07 Sep 2004
Posts: 29
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| Posted: Wed Mar 16, 23:34 |
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Thanks DDawg, but I need an identical view, but in color, not the grey scale view shown on that page.
Know where one of those could be found?
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DDawg
Joined: 17 Apr 2004
Posts: 493
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| Posted: Wed Mar 16, 23:50 |
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No ... I have scowerd the net ... this is the only view from the satellite I ever found.
I had always wanted to do something like Pikes peak ... but never found the right game yet ... let alone time.
Now what you can do is use the black and white sat image for the road layout and you can also use the topo image map to get elevation without much hassle @ one click out....
then do a google search for pike's peak hill climb and use the images selection. there you will find some color pictures ... guess what brown white and green will be the major colors.
The other suggestion would be to write the Colorado Springs Chamber of Congress and see if they could help you out.
_________________
If you can't run with the Big Dawg's, pour yourself a beer and relax on the porch!
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DarkDog
Joined: 07 Sep 2004
Posts: 29
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| Posted: Thu Mar 17, 00:26 |
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We have already found a 24 bit Height map image, which has more then enough detail for the elevations needed. It was just a good color map for doing the terrain and identifying exactly where the trees and other objects (boulders) would be placed to be as accurate as possible.
I've emailed the fellow who runs the actual race to see if he has anything.
Talking to the Colorado Springs Chamber of Congress might also be worth while. Thanks for the idea.
If any one lives in the area, a video of the ride up and down would sure be nice!
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DarkDog
Joined: 07 Sep 2004
Posts: 29
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| Posted: Thu Jul 14, 01:39 |
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For those of you interested....
We have had some success in getting Pikes Peak into Xpand Rally. Between a friend of mine and myself, we have managed to import a 24 bit hieght map of the mountain and surrounding area. Our tests so far have been successful with a 10.69km x 10.69km map that is 2.38km high. We have mapped the actual road into a Colormap and have placed this over the terrain, giving us a rough road to follow.
As for objects, just for the fun of it I populated the sides of the roads with Spruce trees. No other objects have been added yet as we need to work on flattening the road. Before we start that, we are in discussions with how large of a map we should make. The 10.69km square map works great for driving on, but does not include some of the cool roads around the lakes near the start line. As a result, we are playing around with expanding the map to a 12km square map that would include a slew of trails and other roads that are in the area. We are using the black and white satellite imagery to place the roads in their proper location on the elevation map. this will give us the road all the way from the Toll Booth up to the top of the hill.
In our current state with 10.69km square terrain, with the bumpy roads, its fun to drive to the top of the mountain and launch yourself off the edge.
There is lots more to do, but things are moving along nicely!
Here are some screen shots of driving up just before the W's, and one of the car falling 1/4 way down from the top of Pikes Peak. The helicopter view makes it look more horizontal than it really is.
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Description: Launching the car off the top of Pikes Peak. |
| Size: 139.39 KB |
| Viewed: 300 Time(s) |
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Description: Driving Up a rough Pikes Peak (just before the W's) in simulation Mode in Xpand Rally. |
| Size: 91.21 KB |
| Viewed: 318 Time(s) |
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igi
Joined: 10 Sep 2003
Posts: 76
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| Posted: Thu Jul 14, 12:28 |
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Glad to see some progress.  It was awful quiet in here 
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DarkDog
Joined: 07 Sep 2004
Posts: 29
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| Posted: Thu Jul 14, 16:59 |
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We would have more done, but I had to finish writting a tutorial on how to make Xpand Rally maps first. I figured it was more important to get a good, solid tutorial made for everyone to use before progressing any further on Pikes Peak.
Now that the tutorial is finished, we are getting back on getting this map setup. We have both tested our prototype map on two different computers with different setups and it works fine on both so far. We were concerned about the physical size of the map but even our low end machine seems to load it up fine (it takes alongtime, but in the end, it does make it). The real test will be once we have the whole map covered in trees, how will that affect the frame rate. We might have to drop down to a mixture of billboard trees and object trees in order to keep the frame rate up. More experimentation will tell us how that works.
Right now we have a 1km square being drawn around the car for visiblity (terrain). While down in the flatter sections its fine as the trees block most of the view, once you reach the W's and start climbing, some magic mountain work starts to happen as the mountain in front of you appears out of no where 1km in front of you. I don't think there is anything we can do about this, but we will see. If we expand this window beyond 1km, then the physical number of polygons being rendered will affect the frame rate for sure. We are already using a height map of 4097x4097 so we need to be careful in this area.
Like I said before, experimentation!
Here is a better picture of Cliff Diving Off of Pikes Peak.
https://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y120/Darkdogxpand/PikesPeak3.png
In this picture you can see the 1km rendering issue where the ground in the distance is not rendered so it appears as a giant green surface. There is also a problem with the sky being to small. The blue Tee-Pee you see in the distance is the sky that we have driven through and are now looking back at it from above it. Techland is looking into this. Hopefully they can fix it, otherwise we might turn the sky off which would affect having different weather affects, so we are hoping Techland comes through with a solution on how to enlarge the sky.
P.S. I agree about this forum being so quiet.... Its errie. Its frustrating seeing the potential this game has. I can only hope it gets better in the future.
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Description: Here is a better image of how steep the hill is falling down the cliff. |
| Size: 102.63 KB |
| Viewed: 276 Time(s) |
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sYn
Joined: 07 Jul 2004
Posts: 116
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| Posted: Sun Jul 17, 19:04 |
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awesome !
pikes peak most def should be in xpand
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DarkDog
Joined: 07 Sep 2004
Posts: 29
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| Posted: Wed Jul 20, 21:26 |
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Over the weekend I took some of my friends footage of driving on the Pikes Peak Map we are creating and made a little 6 1/2 minute long video of what it looks like. The video was taken on a laptop with FRAPS so the frame rates drops down to 15 fps at times. My friend is also driving via keyboard and in simulation mode, so he is taking it easy to ensure he gets to the top. The map has not had any of its roads flattened (well, maybe 0.001% done). The end of the video shows the car being launched off the cliff at the top.
In the near future we are going to start flattening the roads and adding more in as we have expanded the terrain to include more side roads near the lakes. We will also start adding in more objects such as boulders and more trees to fill in the spaces. The Rainbow colored Terrain Color map is currently being used to identify what height the terrain is at.
Check the video out here (51 Megs):
https://www.edgefiles.com/files/20391.html
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guybo
Joined: 01 Dec 2004
Posts: 411
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| Posted: Thu Mar 16, 02:57 |
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Did this map die or did it ever see the light of day? I would love to make the Pike's Peak run in XR. I have seen some video of it and it is an insane ride!
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DarkDog
Joined: 07 Sep 2004
Posts: 29
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| Posted: Thu Mar 16, 17:36 |
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No the map is not dead yet. I have run into technical difficulties with how the Chrome Editor handles its elevation steps in each map. I am currently in a game of email tag with Techland to try to determine if its possible or not.
My dilema lies in that Techland is saying each Xpand Map can only have 4096 levels of elevation. Depending on how high your map is going to be, that would mean your total height divided by 4096 gives you a rough elevation between each step on a height map. In Pikes Peaks case, this map is about 1.5km tall which ends up having a rough step size of 37cm (1500m/4096 = 0.366). This is very rough and would not make a very good map. The problem appears when your actually in Chrome and editting the map surface. If what Techland was say is true regarding the 4096, then I believe when I move a map section up or down, it should jump by 37cm, which it is not. I am able to make small adjustments that I would estimate to be around 2cm in size, which is great.
So what is the problem?
Techlands map editting suite is called Chrome. Chrome is pretty good at doing most things but really sucks at making roads. It has a ramp function which gives you a nice flat road as long as it is straight. The minute you want it to turn, your reduced to hand editing each point on the road. When your dealing with Pikes Peak, you have multiple Km's of road to edit.... which turns into mission impossible. I found an external height map editor called Leveller which fit what I was trying to do perfectly. I conviced the creator of Leveller to add in a road builder which worked really well. I then made a plugin for Leveller to export the leveller map as a XPand Rally map. Here is where the trouble starts. Techland is doing something weird with their height maps as I can import a leveller map as a Xpand map and it "looks" identical. Now if I spend a bunch of time in Leveller and flatten out all the roads and then export the map, the road sections in Xpand fall apart and become bumpy while the rest of the terrain "looks" fine. These rough roads are essentially impossible to drive on as your car falls apart and won't stay on the road when approaching speeds above 50km/hr. Here is where I think the 4096 rule is entering the picture, but I'm not sure how. I'm trying to get an answer from Techland regarding exactly how Chrome works with this 4096 number so that I can change my Leveller plugin to do it properly so that the exported map keeps its smooth roads. In Chrome, I can go in and edit the bumpy road to be smooth again, but then I end up back at that multiple Km's of roads to edit point by point which is way to much work.
If Techland ever gets back to me with an answer, and its favorable to me and I'm able to correct my Leveller plugin, a Pikes Peak map would be just around the corner for Xpand Rally. I have no idea how well this work work as a multiplayer map, as no one has ever tried to load a 12kmx12kmx1.5km map and play aginst others, but it does work great as a single player map. Of course, I have a ton of trees to add in but that shouldn't affect it too much (I hope!). Lets get past the bumpy road issues first.
I've rambled on to long....
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guybo
Joined: 01 Dec 2004
Posts: 411
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| Posted: Thu Mar 16, 23:37 |
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/me bows 
Sorry i ever doubted you! Thanks for the work. It'd be truly awesome to be able to make the Pike's Peak run and it seems that you are the one to do it because you have loads of stick-to-itiveness!
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DarkDog
Joined: 07 Sep 2004
Posts: 29
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| Posted: Fri Mar 17, 02:16 |
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I'm hoping with the North American Release of Xpand in April that things will improve with this great game. Since it was really only released in Europe and area, North America seemed to miss it. I was fortunate enoughto stumble across it while searching for rally games. I then ordered two copies (as well as Richard Burns Rally) through gogamer for myself and a friend. We both love the game, are happy with the "physics" and have a great time over all driving where ever we want, not just on a set path. We enjoyed it enough to start the Pikes Peak Map and I even created a tutorial on how to make maps. Over all, its the only game I really play right now, between work and my kids/wife. The Richard Burns has been tried a few times, but its ultra realistic physics just seem to be too much and removes some of the fun for me. I got tired of being hung up on tree stumps after some time. I think its a great game as well, but not as much fun as Xpand Rally is. Hopefully with the North American Release, Xpand will get more attention and more players will be here playing it (hopefully on a Pikes Peak Map!)
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guybo
Joined: 01 Dec 2004
Posts: 411
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| Posted: Fri Mar 17, 09:27 |
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The xmas before last my mother-in-law in France got me XR. I played it a lot until I beat it last spring. The major prob I had (and still have) is that certain places run really poorly. Esp. Poland!
It's true that the extra game modes do make XR an attractive game and the moddability does too. I still think about the Ireland track sometimes because I like it so much.
Now I have mainly moved on to CRC and RBR though I fire up XR occasionally. When your track comes out my wife and I are going to do it together.
We rally as a team- I drive and she is the co-driver calling pacenotes. We clone the PC display to the TV and she sits back on the couch with the pace notes (we do a recce and then a shakedown together before a race). We've seen video of the Pike's Peak hill climb and it's insane! We're both looking forward to your map (in whatever form it may be).
Right now we are playing RBR together and it makes the game a lot more fun.
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