Show me your car :)

[Jimmi Allison]

US Pits testing early livery with a brand new "sponsor" (my work and ISP)

Are you working on a skin - lets see it

 

[Noel Hibbard]

I suck at skins so I thought I would do a skin with a bunch of lines that are hard as hell to get lined up.

 

[Shawn Campbell]

Jimmi can I send you a skin for early testing? I am not sure which car we will choose but I have been using the 911 and as such want to submit a preseason testing skin for myself. Let me know if this is OK.

 

[Jimmi Allison]

If you just want to test, this is what you should do.

1. Open rFactor 2, go to vehicles and choose "tuning" on the car you want to use. Click on create dir, this makes a new directory in your player directory:
UserData\player\Settings\VEC_Aston\VEC_902
Now go to Photoshop and save you skins as dx5 as "VEC_ALT" that way you can chose the skin my clicking variants.

It will even upload to the server once you join

 

[Joe Ciampa]

Odin Racing skins WIP.....

 

[Noel Hibbard]

If you just want to test, this is what you should do.

1. Open rFactor 2, go to vehicles and choose "tuning" on the car you want to use. Click on create dir, this makes a new directory in your player directory:
UserData\player\Settings\VEC_Aston\VEC_902
Now go to Photoshop and save you skins as dx5 as "VEC_ALT" that way you can chose the skin my clicking variants.

It will even upload to the server once you join

The key is to put the letters "alt" in your DDS filename. NOELalt.dds or altNOEL.dds would both work.

Then when you join the server you will see a red square to the left of your name in the monitor. This means your skin hasn't been uploaded to the server yet. Then it turns gray which means it is uploading. When the upload is done it turns green. At that point, anyone who is on the server will download your skin from the server and your name in their monitor will then turn from red to green.

If you are framiliar with the MAS2 tool you can compress your DDS file into a MAS file with the same name as your skin. For example altNOEL.mas. This will take your skin from 5.7mb to 500kb and takes a lot of load off the server. You can imagin how much bandwidth it would take if you
Have 20 people on the server with 5.7mb skins flying all over the place. We probably need a policy in place that mandates that you join the server before race day to upload your skin so everyone isn't hammering the server on race day.

 

[Shawn Campbell]

If you just want to test, this is what you should do.

1. Open rFactor 2, go to vehicles and choose "tuning" on the car you want to use. Click on create dir, this makes a new directory in your player directory:
UserData\player\Settings\VEC_Aston\VEC_902
Now go to Photoshop and save you skins as dx5 as "VEC_ALT" that way you can chose the skin my clicking variants.

It will even upload to the server once you join

Awesome, Thanks Jimmi!!

 

[Shawn Campbell]

Here is my early preseason testing skin for the Porsche.

 

[Jimmi Allison]

What's cool about this is that each driver can have his own car in testing. I would recommend that people don't change the design radically from the team design, adding your personal name on a car is cool.
I know that SimHQ / ADC did this last season (on window file). Luckily rF2 handles this way smarter so it wont be an issue.

However i do urge people (teams) to submit a skin pack with these. We have not tested if this would be an issue in racemode.

 

[Shawn Campbell]

Trouble is I'm not certain if it got uploaded to the server or not.. If anyone is going on the server tomorrow night let me know. I would like to see ithe server received it or not. I followed Noel's procedure. I did not make a new file with my name and team through the "create new folder" functiin in the in game menu. I just copied the skin into the first folder it made as a mas file named ShawnCalt. I noticed if I try to make another folder it asks for the driver name and team name. Do I have to do that for it to get sent to the server?

 

[Jimmi Allison]

I dont see it on the server. You just need to select it in "Tuning" and thats all.
If you can get on the server now, i can check.

 

[Shawn Campbell]

Ok ill go on now

 

[Jimmi Allison]

Ok ill go on now

Im on my way

 

[Jimmi Allison]

As promised - this is what i saw Shawn.
Upload was quite slow - not sure whats going on, maybe Noel or ISI has some ideas.

 

[Shawn Campbell]

Jimmi, Go back on the server I think I found out what was going on. I needed to activate skin sharing from the menu.

 

[Jimmi Allison]

Jimmi, Go back on the server I think I found out what was going on. I needed to activate skin sharing from the menu.

You just left before i joined

 

[Shawn Campbell]

You just left before i joined

OK going back on now

 

[Jimmi Allison]

OK going back on now

And there it is

 

[Noel Hibbard]

As promised - this is what i saw Shawn.
Upload was quite slow - not sure whats going on, maybe Noel or ISI has some ideas.

In this screenshot your name is red which means your skin hasn't uploaded to the server yet. Shawn is gray which means you are currently downloading his skin from the server.

The process is very slow because it uses some very aggressive QoS to prevent the skin xfers from taking too much bandwidth from the race server. What would be really cool is if ISI could hook into some other service like Dropbox for sharing skins so the bandwidth is offloaded from the actual server.

 

[Shawn Campbell]

The key is before you join the race, click settings on the lower portion of your screen, then select display. Make sure the load custom skins option is checked green, see here: