We started working on this track when R6 and URV visited me (Marv) in May 2016. Our plan was to create a track while the guys were over at my house so we started drawing a plan on a large sheet of paper. We started modeling immediately and shortly after, the base mesh was more or less done. Some additions like the canyon made it into the track a year later.
We started adding more and more details to the track and came up with more ideas as time went on. In late 2017 we found ourselves in a situation where we had a track with a great concept and track flow. Still, there were so many things that had to be worked on. We took it too far. An open track like this is not an easy project. Despite all the difficulties and lack of motivation, we pushed through it and here we are now.
I developed a Blender add-on along the way which helped me to work out all the details and the lighting. Managing all the instance files, applying properties to all objects and making them look right would not have been possible otherwise. You can find the source code on my GitHub (maybe GitLab at some point) profile: yethiel.
Thomas and I started a sprint in August 2018 to finally get the track done, mainly because another All's Fair competition was coming up and we showcased the track in the previous one already. So we thought it'd be nice to get it done by then. The version we played in AF 5 wasn't perfect but it had the reverse version set at night which Huki and I added extended features to RVGL for.
Thomas did a ton of MakeItGood work on his Thinkpad. The track ran at like 15 fps and I'm super thankful he's been putting up with such a big project. He did all the annoying stuff I never bothered to learn (and yet have to implement in my Blender add-on).
At some point the AI nodes wouldn't save anymore. Rather than doing them again from scratch, I just moved the church to the left side of the train station. It used to be right behind the saloon.
Even though I'm getting a bit anxious when I open the track file in Blender, I'm extremely proud of what we achieved.
I've always collaborated with Thomas when I made tracks (he always did the MIG stuff for me). This is our first true collaboration. You wouldn't believe how much working on this together connected us. Thanks Thomas for bearing with me when I was in a bad mood or hard to work with. It means a lot to me!
-Marv
Ranch.... A beautiful plan and a beautiful execution, hopefully you think the same. Back in 2011 I met Marv through Re-Volt Live or something - and we always had worked on smaller and bigger projects before - yet there was never one that we could consider finished! Ranch is our first work where we put blood, sweat and tears and we are absolutely satisfied with the result.
There were of course moments where we needed to support each other and I will never forget those moments, I think that is what made this project special. I must point out that Ranch was an open track, it was always designed to be. This track type does not suit Re-volt specifically - it is more suited for Red Dead Redemption or GTA. But we liked the challenge. This means everything had to be modeled and be taken care of - which took a lot of time, whereas the only downside is the amount of polygons has to be rendered in a view, which lowers your FPS. If there's something that Ranch has taught me - is that teamwork can totally push you through and real friendships can come into existence ;-)
Thank you for playing this track and reading this readme, I hope you will enjoy the experience
we created for you!
-Thomas
This track requires at least RVGL version 18.0731a.
You can get it from rvgl.re-volt.io.
Shaders needs to be enabled, otherwise the track will not look right.
Do so in rvgl.ini which can be found in the profiles folder: Shaders = 1
The amazing soundtrack is Odie's work.
The challenge times were contributed by Saffron.
Some models were contributed by the community:
Cacti: Tubers
Church: Mighty Cucumber
Shiplight: From RVGL by Allan
Thanks to all the people who tested the track and provided feedback!
I'm using the custom track properties feature on this track. I tweaked the dirt dust to be more realistic.
Another special thing are the two wood materials which are corrugated along two different axes, according to the direction of the wooden planks.
Dirt 1:
Most common surface type of the track.
Dirt 2:
Used in the riverbed
Dirt 3:
Wheat field
Wood:
Horizontal pattern (X axis)
Wood 2:
Vertical pattern (Y axis)
Stone:
Cliffs/Rockface
Gravel:
Carriage tracks
Sand:
Quicksand, out of bounds
The track has too many collision polygons to be exported in a single NCP file. That's why we split it up into three files.
The main ncp file contains collision for the base.
ranch2.ncp belongs to an invisible instance called ranch2.prm and provides collision for buildings.
ranch3.ncp provides collision for instances of the forward version of the track. The instances don't have separate collision files because we're exploiting their matrix (which is actually for storing the orientation) for instance scale (not supported by MIG).
ranch4.ncp is similar to ranch3.ncp. It contains collision data for the reverse version of the track. Since instances don't have collision themselves, this needed to be a separate empty instance for the reverse version. Took me a few hours to realize it's possible...
All textures except for E are saved in JPG format to save space. The loss in quality isn't too drastic. At one point the track was about 130mb. I'm glad we managed to cut it down to ~65mb.
Instances are another trick to cut down on the size. Including all plants, rocks, barrels, ... in the .w file would have bloated it up quite a bit.
All other textures (loading screen, gfx image) are JPGs as well.
As per huki's suggestion, we put the .w files through Jig's WorldCut with these settings:
Cubes size: 4000
BigCubes size: 12000
I'm sure they are somewhere... At some point we stopped working from xcf/psd/kra/blend files and just worked on bare files. W/PRM/NCP is quite a robust format and well supported by my add-on so we often deleted our work files and started from an imported version of the track.
Don't do that, we did that to cut some corners.