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Development | |
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| | Motivation
Around
2003, José Luis told me about he wanted to make a track with a
local taste for GPL or NR2003 that we were racing with as we were also
admins of a couple of latinamerica leagues by then.  In
the middle of that year I took JL to the track with my
car (a
mustang GT '92 in road race trim) so he could see, first hand some
"real life racing", he enjoyed the day and the layout of the track so
we were determined to come back another day to gather all the info we
needed to make a version of the track for some of the sims we were
playing at the time.
Info gathering
 In
June 2003 we took a circuit map (that was provided by people of the
track, Mr. Eduardo Yanes, which aint correct BTW), our bycicles, a high
resolution GPS, a long measure tape, tons of paper and cameras. We did
the usual stop at "La Encrucijada" for the always delicious "roasted
pork back leg" sandwichs that ended in stomach of a thief dog that I
imagine that never had been feeded that good. It took all day to gather
all the info we needed, pit building measures and surroundings, turn by
turn schemes, and so on. The fact that the track is actually pretty
flat mad e
our life a lot easier, there is just one long deep of about a meter
into the "Zamuros" area. And only the last turn has a little banking.
Track making
With
all this info, JL put eveything into autocad to simplify the layout to
a few turns and straights. And with his results I started to work. This
was not the era of google maps or anything similar, it had to be done
with all the numbers we got, after all these years I got this simple
layout that he calculated over a google map grab of the area and see
now that it fits to the perfection, that quite motivated me to do all
the final work needed to make this release.
Initially I made
three
different test layouts, for three different sims of that era: netKar,
GPL & NR2003. I chose to go with the NR2003 because there were
some
road racing mods in progress that made it the sim of choice then, GPL
did not have the cars that matched this small layout and nK wasnt going
anywhere, there was also the fact that Papyrus released the sandbox
utility that made life easier for novice track makers as me.
Abandon
After
a lot of work and having the track almost ready with just a couple of
trees missing I withdrawed the project. The cars available were
too fast for a small layout like this, they had way too much grip and
it wasn't funny anymore. So, it slept almost 4 years in my disks and
backups.
Revival
On
march 2007, by a I can't recall reason I got into theuspits forum and
saw that David Noonan had published a conversion utility to port tracks
from one sim to another. After a week of giving it many thoughts I
decided to buy the utility and in a few minutes using the nr2k3
->
rf tutorial I got the track running in my rfactor copy. I opted then
for the conversion path, start over looked way to harsh, I took into
account that track layout and object position was very important
because I wanted to keep as real as possible and the original papy
layout was just perfect in that sense. Today I have my doubts is this
was the right route to take.
Results
After
over two months of hard work during free time (and not so free) the
track is ready. During this time (since we made the original info
gathering) the track has changed the looks a little, some colors,
billboards and publicity mostly (I have not been there since, I even
sold my car :-( ). I chose to keep everything as it was then, in the
2003 season.That is why you wont see some of the new sponsors that are
actually in the track and some companies that just dont exist anymore.
I just want to keep as close as possible to what we saw that day. The
layout is the same, it has not been changed in the last 10 years after
the '95 cut.
There are some things that I would like
to look or
work better, but I had to stop one day. I'm quite satisfied with what
I've done so far and exceeds what I originally planned for it, this
ain't my everyday job I'm just a newbie so maybe the the final result are
not as professional as I wanted but my family is waiting for me
:-D.
My
only hope is that all this work would motivate some to do safer
motorsport AT the track, as I lived and enjoyed in the years
of Club Copa (a defunct club racing organization) and work as
a
tool for those that would like to get into motorsports locally because
today sims gives you experiences that really work in real life racing
and the best of all, it's way cheaper! |
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