Djey

It's time for another update on what we've been working on in the past couple weeks!
 
The first official RTX Map Crash Fix
Today we'd like to announce the first real solution to the well known "RTX Map Crash" issue, which has become a bigger issue each and every year. We have spend our time researching what the exact cause of this issue is, and have finally been able to crack the code and fix it for good.
You might wonder what our fix brings to the table that other fixes do not. First of all, our solution actually looks at what causes the crash and resolves it, rather than providing a workaround that happens to mitigate the issue, while bringing new issues to life like performance loss or random CTDs.
With our fix, TDU2 players with modern graphics cards can enjoy TDU2 once again without the need to install any DLL files or tools. Just check the box in the TDUniverse launcher and you're ready to go!
 
 
Andraste Mod Platform
Powering our new RTX fix is our new Andraste modding platform. Andraste provides a new way of modding TDU2, allowing you to create plugins for the game and negating the need to replace any files in your game directory. Say goodbye to needing multiple game installs!
Want to learn more about Andraste? Take a look through the documentation here.
To get you started, we have already implemented a couple nice-to-have mods into the Settings menu:
- GPU Crash Fix (RTX/GTX 1660 Fix)
- No Car Damage
- No Car Dirt
- Skip Intro Movies (Faster Start)
 
The update is available NOW! Just open your launcher and you will be prompted to update.
Enjoy!
 

 

 
Join our Discord to stay up to date with updates surrounding TDUniverse!
Also consider joining the TDUniverse Club on Turboduck!
 
Thank you for reading. Keep your eyes open for the next update!

As the work continues and the release approaches, we want to keep you updated on our "Continuity" mod pack and the content it will bring to you!
Starting today, we will periodically introduce you to some of the cars coming to TDUniverse Continuity. To kick it off, we introduce you to the 2021 Porsche 911 Turbo S:
 
"The art of blending performance with luxury has long been the philosophy of the Porsche 911. But how does one redefine its own benchmark? Enter the 992-generation Porsche 911 Turbo S, with an elevated flat-6 twin turbocharged engine pushing 640 horses with an impressive 800 Nm of torque. To meet the drivers needs, Porsche redefined it's own recipe combining larger exhaust turbochargers with piezo injectors and feeding it all through the side air intakes for maximum power efficiency. Combined with the famous PDK transmission, you will be switching through the gears faster than realizing that the quarter mile is only 10.6 seconds away. As performance demands exclusivity, Porsche Exclusive Manufaktur provides a broad selection of wheel, paint and upholstery choices, to make your 911 truly yours."
 





Specifications:
Engine: 3745cc Flat 6-cylinder
Aspiration: Twin-Turbocharged
Power: 640 hp
Torque: 800 Nm
Acceleration: 0-100 km/h in 2.7 seconds
Top Speed: 330 km/h
Weight: 1640 kg
Class: A2
 

 
Join our Discord to stay up to date with updates surrounding TDUniverse!
Also consider joining the TDUniverse Club on Turboduck!
 
Thank you for reading. Keep your eyes open for the next one!
 

Hello Friends!
I took easter as a chance to look through all of my projects, judging their state, what needs to be done and thus writing this blog post, because I always have a lot of cool projects running, but they are barely known to most (except those that lurk on universe and turboduck discords ;)), which I really have to change because they are awesome!
If you want to know more about any of these projects, ask in discord or even better: comment on this post, I'll try to answer as much as I can.
So, without further ado, let's jump into the projects:

Test Drive Unlimited 2:
After being a complete medial disaster, we've finally managed to bring the launcher/announcement post on turboduck:
In the meantime, the server has become main-feature-complete, minus the Casino.
Besides that there are a lot of missing smaller things (mostly stats, custom pictures in houses, club-vs-club races (I could never test them as that would mean 8 active players), ORC (CRC works!)).
If you like TDU2, also don't skip over our blog post about our dynamic matchmaking and why it's the superior solution among tdu2 servers here:
The TLDR is that our approach is reactive and instead of relying on any launcher doing magic detections, we're dead easy: If there are issues with lobbying, rating goes down and someone else is chosen.
 
Test Drive Unlimited (1):
For TDU1, I also have a lot in store that you may not expect at all.
Multiplayer wise, I've been working on integrating the tdu1 protocol into the existing tduniverse tdu2 code-base and to my surprise, it lines up much more than I even though.
Freeride/freeroam is technically possible, however I still have a hard-to-understand issue where the peer-to-peer communication between player 1 and the host causes the host to crash.
Whenever I have the time and motivation and a good idea, this may be solvable and then I can start asking for volunteers on turboduck/tduniverse to see how lobbies/p2p sync behaves with the original protocol (as opposed to the bolt-on raknet that project paradise relies on, at least partially).
Why?
There's a few reasons why I am reinventing the wheel here:
Maintainability. As far as I know, there is someone that can restart the server, but further development is not possible. Such an addon could be an ignore mode/blacklist, that btw the original protocol even has. Stability/Improvements. It would be a stretch to believe that the original networking may be better then what pp has, because I don't know pp's internals, but I can at least get rid of the need of using a VPN in order to register an account. At least working on that is in our hands again. Completion of missing features! Once we have freeride working, we can focus on porting all other missing features over from tdu2 (e.g. races, clubs) and re-develop others (e.g. the diner, that has evolved into the CRC in tdu2 or the eBay/vehicle auction house).  
Modding Tools, HC Mod, Map Expansion and others that I do for TDU1 will be addressed much further down in this article.
 
Project Riviera:
Finally I can talk about riviera!
Some of you may have already spotted our statusses on Discord, such as "burning tires by the sea", "eating slices of watermelon" and have wondered what that is about.
It's not about adding a new island to tdu2, well, not exactly, but close. At some point in deeply modding the tdu games, I have had a lot of situations, where I've regretted "fighting the game" to achieve what I want. In fact, I've spent quite some time in producing nice tools, enabling things that weren't possible before, but the question always was: What if I spent that work in a game engine, instead, working on a blank game?
This is especially relevant, when we talk about changing very fundamental parts of the game, such as adding in parts that weren't done yet (auction house, night clubs) as well as changing physics, the networking layer (no peer-to-peer or more than 8 player lobbies), the architecture (64 bit) or the rendering layer (RTX Crashes).
If you factor all of those in, it really sounds stupid, trying to mod the game to that degree. And it really is, with the skillset that is available in this community, all that it takes is a vision and a team. So we've set sail into riviera:
What is it?
Riviera is a drive-and-vibe game as well as a love letter to the 80s and the medditarean coast. Just the dolce vita, driving your favourite car in the sun with your friends, pulling the windows down, reving the engine and powersliding down-hill next to the sea.
Conceptually, we're obviously drawing inspiration from our favorite open world racers, but also trying to scale up into the megaserver principle known from some MMORPGS.
That means, we want to have big lobbies (think truckersMP) and even host things like car meets, crew cruises (think: easter/christmas cruises, but also smaller inofficial cruises).
Together, we'll have to find out how easily we can handle many players on a map in early access. But I will write the architecture in a way that it supports those lobbies, but at the same time we can easily have virtual smaller lobbies (e.g. just you and your crew or friends).
Of course, we also want to have dealerships, a special degree of customization, a selection of daily drivers, so you can build up your collection and much more.
As much as I want to tell you about all of our ideas and passion, I also have to hold back to not build promises, because the game will contain what we find out and discover together, in the end.
Our perspective
As you can tell from my motivation in the beginning, we're not creating riviera to satisfy some stakeholders, but instead we want to work on our vision and dream, because we're not satisfied with the games that are made nowadays. Now instead of reposting those "what's wrong with the racing game scene" videos, we try to take fate into our own hands and even if we only fulfill our niche with that, we're satisfied, as we've put our passion into the game.
I say that, because we're always appreciating any help in any way, but we won't be able to finanically compensate work for the forseeable future. Instead, the drive should be to finally be able to create _the_ racing/driving game of our dreams.
If you want to stay up to date (yes you want to!), discuss your ideas with us or ask us clever questions, feel free to join our discord at https://discord.tduniverse.org
 
Riviera Tooling
Tools that we develop to help us building riviera will be shared with the community, where appropriate.
This is both due to our strong beliefs in open source software, as well as trying to be as open to modders as possible.
What would fit better as having modders use the same tools we use to build the game and maybe even have others bringing improvements into our tooling by contributing to the repository?
For now, I can't tell you too much about the tools, but I am currently fighting the mathematics of "riviera calibration", a tool that aims to creating car models from scratch (as we can't port them from existing games for legal reasons) as easy as painting by numbers! Essentially you start with a collection of reference images of your car and they compute the location of the cameras in relation to each other/the model. That way you can add them as views into blender and only need to drag vertices, so that they fit onto the image, painting by numbers.
So again, as you can imagine, the math involved isn't that easy, so wish me luck 😄
 
Andraste Modding Framework
TLDR: Andraste is the framework I wrote primarly to mod tdu games, but in general it will apply to all games, and as such, support for TDU:SC is planned as well.
As the first preparation of that, I've worked on an automated build of our underlying hooking library EasyHook that is 64 bits. After that, I can work on 64bit and DX11 support for Andraste in general.
What can Andraste do today?
Primarly, you can use andraste to replace bnk files without touching your base game installation, so you can seamlessly add and remove mods without having to have 100 different game installs.
Besides that, if you know what you are doing, you can use the very same functionalities, to extend the game with scripts written in C#. As such, I've already created plugins to unlock hardcore mode, allow for bigger bnks (BigBnk) in map sectors, dumping and changing shaders on the fly.
What are future Andraste plans?
A lot of my to-do list is actually Andraste related, but progress there depends a lot on adoption/use of andraste by the community.
Goals that I have include:
A simple GUI, comparable to Mod Organizer or other known Mod Managers Making mods available in a central repository, so you can download them from a browser, they know their dependencies and all. Conflict solving when having multiple mods (e.g. multiple car mods may have conflicting databases or conflicting bnk files). This may also be known as priority, in other mod loaders. Game specific conflict solving of the above (i.e. really _merging_ databases and common bank files, instead of choosing either or, which won't work in most cases). BNK Override mode: Have a folder with the contents of the bnk (e.g. a 2db texture) and just edit it and cause the game to reload the bnk (e.g. re-entering the dealership) and it will have the modified 2db file, essentially gettting rid of manually minibnkmanager'ing for every small change. 64bit support DX11 support, DX12 support (hooking, DearImGui) As you can see, that's quite some stuff and I'd appreciate any help and especially also just actively trying to use Andraste in your workflow!
Feel free to download Andraste from below, documentation is at  https://andrasteframework.github.io/
 
TDU Modding Studio, BNKPlorer, BigFilePacker, XMBPlorer
As said, I can't go too much into detail on those tools, but you can assume that I've written a plethora of tools, all revolving around TDU and covering nearly every asset format that has ever been seen.
As such, I've recently dug into "pmi" files, which, according to BEight, was a key missing part for his mapping ventures, so I'll be supplying an editor for those as well, to help him improving his great mapping even further. In theory, we could have a full coverage for almost every file format in a matter of months/years, but it's very low priority for me at the moment and it's also a mixed topic since I can't release TDU Modding Studio, as is.
If you're interested in working on some of the games file formats, however, feel free to contact me, I've always wanted to write a wiki containing all file formats and the general file structure (a lot of asset files follow the same outer structure, which helped me uncover pmi quite fast).
 
Yeah, so I guess here goes my wall of text,
as mentioned multiple times already, you know where to find me, if you want to comment on or ask anything.
I just wanted to put down all (or say a few of those that I can think of right now) of my projects, because I know for sure that a lot of you don't even know half of what I am doing but could be interested in a lot of those projects.

Our Gameserver has a lot of interesting features, but so far we never shared details about them, which is what I want to change with this blog post series.
In this post, we'll talk about the "automatic Lobby Karma System":
In modern internet forums (such as reddit), where you can up- and downvote content and if the votes are negative enough, the content disappears.
The very same is happening to the lobbies in the TDUniverse Game Server. If a player can't connect to some lobby, it is "downvoted". And if it's below a certain threshold, the lobby is closed.
When player A tries to connect to player B, we can't tell if it's just player A's faulty connection or if player B is a bad host. That's why both players get negative karma, but we have big enough thresholds to account for that.
Also, players with too much negative karma won't be able to vote either (i.e. increasing or decreasing other people's karma).
If you want to experiment with that system, feel free to have a drive on our game server, as well as using our discord bot's debug command (!lobby).
If you just want to drive, however, don't worry, the system will ensure you have a smooth ride in the background. The bot is just for curious nerds.
 
See you on the roads,
MeFisto94