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What better way to start off a first blog post than with some awesome pictures!





I've been laying pretty low around the forums over the last few weeks, mainly because final exams are approaching but also because I've been working on a brand new vehicle for Rigs of Rods. I've built a 'Rock Bouncer' style rig, popularized by wheelers in the South-East US like Tim Cameron and his legendary 'Fat Girl' buggy. The design itself is completely original adopting specs and measurments from the real-life 'Showtime' buggy to give a nice, realistic feel.

Desperado is powered by a supercharged 350 Chevy engine, coupled to a built turbo 350 transmission and an Atlas 4.3 transfer case. Mounted to two 14 bolt axles are a set of custom beadlock rims wrapped up in 44" BFG Krawlers.

I've had a few health problems for the last 3 weeks, so not much progress

Started work on the rear running gear, which seems to be going quite well. Once that's all modelled I'll work on the component textures and uv mapping.

Had an email off Dustin Webster (hi Dustin, if you're reading this) who very kindly sent me a link to the latest crawler he's been involved with. It's so cool and I really want to make a replica of that too now! }:-(

Once the RockHer II is completed and in-game I'll probably start on his latest crawler. It's not as pretty, but damn it climbs like a devil!

Dennis-W is first atm on FuturoTrack (easy): http://www.rigsofrods.com/races/Races/index/page:1/raceName:Easy!/sort:laptime/direction:asc

nobody managed to compete with the Author Dega on Medium, Hard or Extreme

After months of tinkering with this thing off and on, she's released. Quick blog entry, but to the point. I sacrificed some features otherwise I woulda never finished it. I think you'll see it has the detail where it counts.

Some features:
animated suspension
realistic chassis node beam to match the unimog torque tube setup.
Flexbody everything
Flexbody tires that don't clip through the rim
Lots of texture work
3 versions 2 door, 4 door, and a trials caged version

Check out the thread/download on the forums
UNIMOG-406

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drew this image in order to visualize the chaotic String conversions happening in the code.

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so, there is ANSI, WideChar and UTF8 we deal with in RoR atm.

ANSI is used for raw data which comes from some sort of input. UTF-8 is used throughout RoR and for the network code. WideChar (std::wstring) is only used as bridge between ANSI and UTF-8 atm, also most system string operations use wchar_t.

_L() is a UTF-8 encoded UTFString, if we assume the .po file used was using utf8 as well.

L() is a wide char string, which needs to be converted to UTF-8 before we can combine it with other strings: UTFString(L("foobar")), the short form we invented is U("foobar")

UTFString(String("foobar") will not work as the UTFString will assume UTF-8 encoding of the input string. So we need to take a little way around:

ANSI_TO_UTF(String("foobar")) which will convert any ANSI encoded strings into our beloved UTF-8 strings

the problem is now if we hit such code:

Code:

char tmp[128]="";
std::string format = _L("Position: %0.6f s, frame %i / %i");
sprintf(tmp, format.c_str(), ((float)t)/1000000.0f, curOffset, numFrames);
txt->setCaption(String(tmp));

it will break as the format String will be in UTF-8 format if higher characters are used. so we need the wide-char sprintf version:

Code:

wchar_t tmp[128] = L"";
unsigned long t = curFrameTime;
UTFString format = _L("Position: %0.6f s, frame %i / %i");
swprintf(tmp, format.asWStr_c_str(), ((float)t)/1000000.0f, curOffset, numFrames);
txt->setCaption(convertToMyGUIString(tmp, 128));

certainly does not help with readability :|

also, to make the confusion even better, some Parts of Ogre do not understand UTFString, so you get broken info there... :|

so much chaos in the code ... :|

we just surpassed our 500.000 posts mark, thanks everyone

• 500.473 Posts
• 33.816 Threads
• 31.507 Members
• 2.962.978 downloads

thanks for the last 6 years, we look forward to the next 6

Not much progress visually - spent some time UV mapping the body panels (tedious but necessary if I'm to add ambient occlusion later). I'm hoping to get all textures onto a single 2048 x 2048px texture without losing much quality. It's going well so far, as the shot of the rear shows:



New light texture and new Red Bull logo look nice and sharp compared the the low-res artwork down the side (from the old 1nsane skin).

Once all the panels are UV mapped I can start on creating the