Here you go:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/84727521/WityTestCircuitEdit.zip
What i did:
- Splitted new sections to the road using material cross-section. It was 10km long, the preferred length of one section is 300-500m, about the size what you can see from the car. With only one huge mesh, the game has to load it all in the memory at all times, with smaller sections, the game can load only the parts of the track shown on screen.
- Decreased panel lengths. I did this only from start to the end of that long straight. Check the panel lengths in different sections.. You need to wiggle the control arms, move nodes etc, there were un-naturally tight and too big elevation change at the same time, there's a limit of how radical changes you can do to a track in both gameplay and technical issues. There's no rule, it's case by case. But for sure dropping 2m in a span of 5m while turning 200 degrees does not fit to any road suitable for automobiles.
- Did some example of how to merge terrain anchors. Since you're still doing the basic layout work it's not yet necessary but it is before you can make the terrain around pits permanent. After you are satisfied with the start/pit area, you should merge the two tracks. The procedure for this is not intuitive, it's a workaround, BTB can't merge roads the right way.. There are tutorials for that procedure in BTB forum, this is general modding forum.. You'll find more help there.
I also fixed the XPack. Following things were done:
- ground.jpg converted to ground.dds (DXT1, 6 mipmaps)
- the other jpg -> the same thing
- opened it in xpacker, loaded the new dds, replaced the jpg with them and deleted the unused textures.
If you don't need two identical textures in two different materials, you can merge them too in XPacker but it can wait until later stage. Try to avoid replacing textures used in XPacks in venue materials, that'll make the final phases, optimizing textures and materials, really laborious. If you just want to introduce new textures, you can either make an XPack or use the venue material editor in BTB. Copy material and replace it's textures using some of the default materials. Custom XPacks should never have their textures edited in venue material, it affects the final phase (you can't merge materials in XPacker if they are edited in venue material editor, you'll get the wonderful error message that prevents you from opening your project, possibly making the whole project unusable...)
Make backups.. Make lots and lots of backups. Everytime you feel like you've accomplished a task that you don't want to repeat again, save the project. If you've just done 4 hours of terrain editing doing huge changes, make a backup... Save the project with different name each day, before you start you daily work, create a backup. Keep at least one version from early stages and one from yesterday. I'll keep a lot of them, i'll use following format when keeping track of versions: trackname001, trackname002 and so on. It's easy to rollback to earlier working version after the inevitable crash or design error.