by ZachC

Last week I talked about the SUVs. I’m still looking forward to reviewing some paintjobs but they still don’t work. In spite of that there are now even more people trying to sell them in auction. You figure out why. 

Coming soon to an auction near you may be the Scions. The partnership between There and Scion could bring us some really cool new vehicles to play with. Unfortunately the TC model may not be one of them. I’ll mention a few of the glaring problems I’ve found, but there are others. 

First, the model itself is lacking the interior rear sides. The front door panels are modeled, but they stop at the back of the front seats leaving, basically, nothing. In previewer what you see is the exterior paint, but it’s been reported that in real world testing you actually see the outside terrain.

 

Second, the mapping is horrible. In mapping a vehicle you want both sides mapped separately so you can put lettering and graphics on them. Experience with the buggy model has made that obvious to experienced developers. The TC has both sides modeled separately, which is great, but hold on a second…  I couldn’t believe this, but the right side is simply a duplicate of the left side! So in spite of separately mapping the two sides, the right side is still mirrored so everything on it is backwards. I don’t claim to be a great modeler, but I do have to question why they’d waste space on the template for that? If you’re going to mirror them anyway, (not my first  choice) do it the way they do on the buggy template and free up the space for improved resolution.

 

Next issue; why are the doors separated from the sides? The space in the sides where the door SHOULD go is completely empty and wasted. Instead of the doors being included as part of the sides, they’re mapped separately. Worse, there’s only one door. There’s one on the painted template but it doesn’t actually exist. It doesn’t exist anywhere else either, so the door is simply mirrored. That may be a good thing, since anything on the right door will be just as backwards as everything else on the right side of the car. But it gets worse. The door is mapped to a MUCH smaller scale than the sides. That means that even if you manage to get your graphics lined up and sized correctly they’ll still be pixilated even more than those on the rest of the vehicle; which are already horrible. 

Let’s get an overview. The entire car, top, fenders, doors, rear and undercarriage are all placed on a 512x512 template. With the poor usage of the area provided, that means it’s far from high resolution. High resolution is, for some reason, reserved to the hood and front end. The hood and front end are mapped on their own separate 512x512 template. That’s VERY high resolution, so if you’re trying to match up graphics that flow from one part of the car to another, you’ll find it impossible to do without differences in sharpness, or pixelazation. 

The poor mapping was brought up in forums, and we were told it was too late to fix. Since then, Michael Wilson posted that he’s looking into this and that he would rather “see if we can get it right” rather than “not right”. He then said: “Don’t do anything, or stop doing anything yet.” So we just don’t know what’s going to happen. Hopefully they’ll take the time to fix this and any other problems before bringing then into world, because once they’re in it would be unlikely there’ll be any fix.

 

Leaving the Scions, there is at least one major high point to bring to you; that being the new “Apache AH64 T (On the wings)” by Nex3d. This has to be one of the most realistic looking helicopters in There. The detail is incredible, but due to my personal preference I’ll be waiting for him to release the version with the avatars all nestled safely inside. It was approved, but due to technical problems may not be available until the January 30^th. The Apache is priced at an introductory 24,000t and worth every penny. I can’t help but imagine what the Scions would have looked like if they’d had Nex do them. Or Sojka. Or Carcus. Or Meret. I could go on and on, but I need a beer. Or two.