By: DaveO, Oldsnlow AKA Ron Jones.
And Cholerix aka Karl
A little history of how the SCGTS mod came around.
The initial step in creation of the SCGTS mod was back in early 2005 when Magnus Tellbom, founder and maintainer of S.C.O.R.E. Online Racing Site was looking for what mod to run in future Heat online racing seasons on his site. As he had always wanted to run real multiclass GT races, he proposed the making of a large scale multiclass GT mod to some people of his S.C.O.R.E. community. Remembering that S.C.O.R.E. had started in 2003 by running ISI’s Sportscar GT game in it’s initial online season, Cholerix, one of S.C.O.R.E.’S earliest members, suggested this mod to be about the original SCGT cars: GT cars from 1996/97
Sports Car GT, the original game, came out in 1998 from EA and ISI. It was one of the first sportscar racing simulation games that draw attention of the major public – and modelers. A lot of people contributed car models and tracks and some still do. Along with GPL, SCGT helped establishing the racing simulation mod community we are all part of today. The major flaw of SCGT was it’s rather bad netcode, which was why there had always only been very few SCGT online racing sites, and this was the reason why S.C.O.R.E. had dropped racing SCGT after initial season and gone over to running NASCAR Heat instead.
Cholerix then started working on modeling a BMW M3 3D model to give this project a start. But he did so without much enthusiasm at first, as he had rather been up for an entirely different project. But since he was the only 3D modeler involved in the project, there had to be a start be done by someone.
Cholerix’ fun in making the GT cars came once the first car’s 3D model was started to look more like a car than just like a heap of polygons. Even better, the second car in the making was one of Cholerix’ alltime favorite cars, the Porsche 911 GT2. While the making of the BMW had taken almost 2 months, the 911 had been done in 2 weeks. Addiction makes sleep looking less important at times
Making of the Vector was next and almost as fast, while the making of the Saleen – Magnus Tellbom’s favorite - almost took another 2 months. Modeling of that fantastic car had been most challenging because of only few good photos and even less available information. So most of the modeling had to be done along a 1:18 die-cast model of a city version of the car, which had been hard to get hands on as well. But for ebay, that is. For the BMW and the Porsche there been 1:18 die-cast models as well, but none for the Vector.
Once these 4 GT2 cars had been modeled, the backbone of the Sportscar GTS mod was born ! The BMW and Porsche 911 GT3 models were rather easily derived by Cholerix from their GT2 pendants by working out some modifications and – voila – the mod already had cars from 2 GT classes.
Which was when Cholerix decided this would be all the content for the mod’s initial release, as working out another 5 or 6 GT1 car models would have increased development time to far more than was tolerable. Additional cars would have to be added later on as addon packages. And as it happens, GT1 cars is being worked on right now
Graphical works like car paintings and the making of the User Interface, which was intended to reflect the original SCGT game’s UI as close as possible, took quite another lot of time. Especially since making UI this case wasn't just artwork, but quite some coding as well since all items on almost all UI screens had to be moved.
Working out and testing car physics was the final and most time consuming task. Cholerix was going for physics on this mod by first trying to drop any bias on what's common believe to be “true” about Heat's physics – and by trying to validate each and any parameters function and range. Apart from the mod's physics, another outcome of this effort was the Heat Physics tutorial, which later on – suggested by Magnus Tellbom – was upgraded to a full scale Heat Modding tutorial (http://www.speedsims.net/tutorials/NH_m ... index.html)
Though sometime the making of the mod had turned out to be a one-man-project, there has to go really big thanks to some more people for helping to bring the light of day to the Sportscar GTS mod the way it is. VR and NH editor sucahyo had added a lot of great ideas and information in discussions about tire physics, car sounds and UI editing, no less valuable beta test feedback had come from Magnus Tellbom, Ron Jones and Jeff Knox (aka spin_doctor). Without the help of these people the mod would surely be a different one.
The real life pendants of the cars modeled here were rather heavy and powerful for their tires. In real life, balancing tire wear and drift angles and letting neither end of the car do too much of the work is important. This mod does a good job of requiring setups and driving to be done the same way. Especially with the GT2 cars they will use up the rear tires real quickly in a run if not respected. Expect to do a lot of drifting and saving drifts from going into the evil tire eating slides when going quickly.
With the making of the Sportscar GT mod, Cholerix has resurrected the look&feel and the cars of SCGT for Heat so they could be truly raced online. Even better, almost all of the original SCGT tracks have long been available for NASCAR Heat as well, converted by Lucky and Smoke. Only tracks missing are Chatham and Las Vegas.
The Car Selection screen:
The garage screen shows the same options as original SCGT but as of yet some is not enabled. Heat is hard wire for starting with a full fuel tank; there is a adjustment in SCGTS but it does not function. Yet.... as there had been quite a couple of “won't ever work in Heat” issues been vaporized on the making of this mod, SCGTS may serve for an example that there's few “never” that are really “never” in Heat.
Unfortunately, just when SCGTS mod was released, S.C.O.R.E. founder and the mod's initatior, X-Ter aka Magnus Tellbom had lost faith in running and modding Heat because of dwindling numbers of online road racers. Considering Heat to be as good as dead, he moved S.C.O.R.E. over to being a sim racing team site only, dropping all Heat related content and activities entirely.
Since S.C.O.R.E. had been Heat's most visited road racing site at that time, that could have ended up blowing off all of Heat's road online racing community, if not Cholerix' wasn't willing to kind of abandoning 1,5 years of work – and was immediately trying his own Speedsims site to substitute S.C.O.R.E. for a major place where to find Heat online road racing.
Speedsims' initial SCGTS league now had 22 sign-ins within a couple of days and an average 15 drivers showing up for first 2 races. So far as it looks like, Magnus Tellbom's initial idea and concept works just great – probably even way better than it's initiator had thought it might at best. He should have tried to check it out...