Supercar Challenge – McLaren F1 custom livery: F1 Calendar 2009

 

Pit babe HD 1920×1080 widescreen wallpaper – Ferrari F1 reflected in glasses

As this source image was not suitable for a simple crop to 1920×1080, I decided to have a bash at using some of the more advanced features of Paint.NET to construct the wallpaper.

My previous photo editing program was PhotoImpact but I had been dissatisfied with the amount of time it took to load for a long time. However, PhotoImpact does have a number of extremely powerful features and some really useful little bits and bobs that I will miss.

One of these is the option to store preset sizes under custom names on the resize dialog. For example, I had one named “folder.jpg” which resized the image to 256 by 256 pixels. A nice little feature.

Gran Turismo 5 Prologue Ferrari F1

One of the unexpected joys of reaching the end-game of Gran Turismo 3 was the reward of being given a Formula One in all but name. They were called Polyphony001 and Polyphony002 and were Williams F1 cars with different paint jobs. Though I haven’t got there yet myself, there were also F1 cars in Gran Turismo 4.

ThreeSpeech and the official PlayStation.Blog today gave us photographic evidence of a fully licensed Scuderia Ferrari F2007 F1 car in Gran Turismo 5 Prologue PAL and I am rendered near speechless. Drool over the screenshots below (you can click to zoom the Shareapic hosted image for the full resolution version) and make sure you mop up afterwards.

UPDATE 8 April 2008: You need to complete Class S (at least bronze in every event) before you can purchase this car. Oh, and, on the European version, it costs 2,000,000 credits and the largest prize money is 35,000 credits. Start saving…

On track renders: is it just me or are these genuinely photo-realistic?

Renders

Screenshots (notable jaggies in second one, hmm)

Pictures hosted at Shareapic.

ITV Hates Formula One

What would you say is one of the more important aspects of television coverage of a Formula One, or indeed, any, race? The result?

Well, if you are a Fernando Alonso fan, a Sébastien Bourdais fan, a Force India fan, or follow any of the non-Ferrari and BMW F1 field, you’re out of luck. ITV decided to only show the first four cars crossing the finish line at today’s Bahrain Grand Prix (Felipé Massa followed by Raikkonen, Kubica and Heidfeld), cut to an advertising break and never even displayed the finishing positions of the remainder of the field either from the FOA feed or using their own graphics.

You can see the finishing results at the official Formula One website. Alonso was 10th, Bourdais was 15th, Force India finished 12th with Giancarlo Fisichella and 20th and last with Adrian Sutil.

Slimm Says

Clearly the head of sporting coverage at ITV just hates motorsport as even when they do show it, they try and dump it on ITV4 to die (it doesn’t appear to be promoted on any of the other three ITV channels, at least during shows and films I watch). If ITV could show I’m a Celebrity twenty-four hours a day, every day, they would.

The End is Surely Nigh for James Allen

Two good news stories inside one week? First young Shannon Matthews is discovered alive three weeks after being kidnapped and now Formula One returns to the BBC. What is the world coming to?

Bernie Ecclestone appears to have exercised his right to terminate the ITV deal (which still has a couple of years to go) at the end of this season and will see uninterrupted multimedia coverage (TV, radio and internet) broadcast by the BBC. Quote of the story comes, unsurprisingly, from commentating legend Murray Walker:

“I’m absolutely flabbergasted – I was lying in bed listening to the news this morning and I almost fell out of bed when I heard it. It’s an amazing development because I think ITV did and do a superb job, and I think there is more to this than meets the eye.”

Flabbergasted. Great word.

‘More than meets the eye’ is right. ITV won the rights to Formula One coverage originally thanks to it’s chunky wallet. The BBC is unlikely to be able to compete on purely financial terms so it must be something else. Is the temptation of Charlie Cox going to bring down the curtain on James Allen’s live commentary career? Was ITV screening live qualifying on their digital-only channels more and more the last straw? Is the fact that they ignored just about everything except Lewis Hamilton last year (and this year, by the looks of things) upsetting the sponsors of the other nine teams not involved in the championship who weren’t getting a look-in? Were ITV going to giving priority to their FA Cup coverage recently won from the BBC and BSkyB?

What makes this doubly-surprising is, aside from James Allen’s unevocative and droning commentary (according to an expert who shall remain nameless but slimm), ITV have done a splendid job in presenting Formula One. They brought the football-style analysis, highlights and presentation to the sport. Their absolute best move was retaining Murray Walker from the BBC and bringing in Martin Brundle as co-commentator and one hopes against hope that he will transition back to the BBC (though given Damon Hill’s performance at the Hungarian Grand Prix and his hilarious ‘naughty chair’ comments, I would be happy with him as principal alternative).

When asked for a comment, I said: “Whatever the reason behind the switch, I am sure that James Allen’s services will not be retained for live commentary.” To be fair, it should be noted that James Allen tends to do a much better job with the GP2 highlights commentary and he is a much better writer than extemporaneous speaker. His biography of Nigel Mansell (as ghost writer) was an excellent read and his Michael Schumacher books appear to be of the same calibre.

Bye James.

Ferrari F1 (February 2008) HD widescreen wallpaper

The Ferrari 248 F1 used during the 2006 Formula One FIA World Championship campaign.

Images hosted at Shareapic.

Exploded Honda Formula One Car HD widescreen wallpaper

This is a wallpaper of the Honda F1 car from the 2006 London Motor Show which was suspended from the ceiling in an exploded form.

Original photograph released under Creative Commons licence by Toby Maloy on flickr.com.

Ferrari F355 Challenge: Scuderia Ferrari truck livery Forza Motorsport 2 custom paint job

Inspiration for this paint scheme came from the Iveco trucks that were used in 2001 by the Formula One Ferrari racing team Scuderia Ferrari.

It is a two-tone silver and red scheme with the Scuderia Ferrari logo emblazoned on the side. The badge seen here is a heavily masked version of the manufacturer’s decal supplied. The Italian flag colours have been replaced at the top with a shallow chevron design. The shield shape was created by placing a red hollow shield vinyl over the Ferrari manufacturer’s decal. Nice and simple.

The other design note is the monochrome sponsor logos for FIAT, AMD and Olympus seen either side of the rear wheel-arch. My original idea was simply to pick white monochrome decals from the four pages available in Forza. Except on this Ferrari there is less than a single page of manufacturer decals available. Very peculiar. So I set about creating some of the simpler sponsor logos manually. Thanks to Forza’s handy Change Colour for a group of vinyl’s option, I was able to create the AMD and Olympus logos in their normal colouring and then change the whole thing to white when stamping in the final location. As a bonus, I now have these three logos available to stamp onto any car.

The design above is my second iteration. This is my first.

I decided that there was too much silver on this version and so adjusted it as above. The monochrome sponsor logos were stacked vertically just behind the rear wheel-arch. I had also simply pasted the Scuderia Ferrari logo in the same orientation on the other side of the car meaning that the Ferrari badge was toward the rear of the car. When I did it, I thought it didn’t look right but wasn’t quite sure why. When I tweaked the design with the second iteration I realised what was wrong and fixed it and so the Ferrari badge is toward the front of the car on both sides.

Lotus Carlton: Lotus JPS inspired Forza Motorsport 2 custom paint job

Having won an old Lotus Carlton I decided to pay homage to the classic John Player Special black and gold Lotus’ of the late 1970’s Formula One circus.

Despite some time being spent on it, one thing that didn’t work out was a JPS logo. None of the Forza fonts were close to the original and while constructing a J and P from primitives posed no problems, I simply couldn’t get an S that worked.

One of the really cool things with the JPS Lotus was that all the sponsor logos were in black and gold regardless of their original colours. I recreated the Texaco logo as it was nice and simple and was also used on the original cars. Perhaps Forza Motorsport 3 will allow us to tint manufacturer logo’s so that this effect can be easily achieved in the future.

After getting tired of painting, I went racing with Version 1 (below) and instantly decided that I didn’t like the pattern over the front wheel-arch. I’d also forgotten to do anything with the rear of the car which is something I always seem to do.

Version 1

I altered the wheel arch pattern to cover just the front door and placed the Lotus Motorsport logo inside. The colouring of the logo was entirely appropriate to the JPS colour scheme and made that part of the car look a bit more interesting. I also painted the front and rear bumper with a wrap-around pattern and added a black and gold ring to the Vauxhall badge in the same way that the Formula One cars had a little round JPS badge on their noses.

Version 2

I had a good time with this car as it is a nice unusual entry into a racing game and I used it to whup A-class Ferrari’s and Porsche’s.

Sir Geoff Crammond’s Grand Prix 4 HD widescreen wallpapers

In tribute to Sir Geoff’s legendary Grand Prix (aka World Circuit) racing series here are HD widescreen wallpapers re-edited from the official wallpapers.

Side

Rear

PGR 4: Project Gotham Racing HD widescreen wallpaper

The Project Gotham Racing 4 demo hits Xbox Live this week with the game in hot pursuit in retail. The demo is big (1.27GB) but is taking an age to download for some reason but I might pop a preview up soon.

This taken from the official cover artwork available on Microsoft Game Studios Dutch site.

With Activision distributing future multi-platform titles for Bizarre Creations one wonders if Activision have purchased the currently-lapsed Formula One licence (it used to be a Sony exclusive) and are taking Bizarre Creations back to their roots in making Formula One racing games. Oooh, that would be nice.

Spyker F1 HD widescreen wallpaper

Spyker just secured a very lucrative Formula 1 World Championship point so I thought it was about time I posted this 1920×1080 widescreen wallpaper I’ve had sitting on my desktop for a while. What makes this a great PC wallpaper is the fact that the background on the left is out of focus and this makes your icons stand out nicely.

Spyker toolbox

The original picture is an official Spyker wallpaper from their excellent digital magazine which comes out after each grand prix. I’ve enjoyed reading them this year (though I do wish the pictures in the galleries could be seen at a higher resolution) and hope they continue with this next year under new ownership.

Pit Babes HD widescreen wallpaper

Some wallpapers adapted from works posted under the “free to adapt” licence on flickr.com.

Bridgestone promotional model

BAR grid girl

Why Don’t Replay Coders Use The Same Buttons As Everyone Else?

One of the standard features of racing videogames is the replay.

Oddly, it has proven remarkably difficult to get right though the reasons for this are pretty obvious. Most replay systems miss or diminish the best action or fail to make your heroic efforts appear heroic by using the wrong camera at any given moment.

The genre-leading replay system belongs to Sir Geoff Crammond’s legendary Grand Prix series. (What is Sir Geoff up to these days?) The reasons the replay system was so good? It tended to replicate the camera positions as used by the Formula One Administration that broadcast the races on television. The choice of cameras ran into double-digits. The action could be rewound not just dumped back at the beginning. However, these aren’t the most important reasons why the replay system in Grand Prix was so good.

The most important aspect was that the computer could intelligently choose a camera and the action to focus on with a mode that remains virtually unique in replay systems: the Director. At any point, you could press a button and the computer would decide what to show and how. It did this by looking at the flow of the race and highlighting a close battle or watching the leader complete a couple of laps or focusing on an accident.

I’m not saying that the replay system always chose the right camera but I am highlighting that a decision was made over which camera to use. In most replay systems, the camera choice is entirely arbitrary. At any given moment, the number of camera positions which make your driving look amazing are far less than the number of optimum camera positions. Therefore, most replay systems tend to not present your driving or any specific action with an optimum camera position. Grand Prix makes the strongest effort in any replay system to choose an appropriate camera.

The only thing the Grand Prix replay system lacked (that could have been reasonably added) was, funnily enough, a replay system. Television broadcasts follow the action but if something cool happens like an overtake or an accident, it is replayed from different angles. This never happens in any racing game replay. (The slow motion cameras in the Need for Speed series are not replays.)

The Grand Prix replay proves such a remarkably convincing system that you could practice delivering a race commentary and pretend you were Murray Walker. It’s not as easy as it looks, er, sounds. Just ask James Allen. Which, I believe, requires a few quotes from the great man:

“…and there’s no damage to the car… except to the car itself.”

“and I interrupt myself to bring you this…”

“This is an interesting circuit because it has inclines, and not just up, but down as well.”

“Only a few more laps to go and then the action will begin, unless this is the action, which it is.”

“This has been a great season for Nelson Piquet, as he is now known, and always has been.”

“And the first five places are filled by five different cars.”

The mighty Grand Prix series replay function even did something else that a lot of replay systems do not: it used the same keys in gameplay and in replay to change the camera.

It is surprisingly uncommon for a replay system to use the gameplay key for change camera. Some games, like Colin McRae: DiRT and the Forza Motorsport series, use a menu to change cameras in the replay. Some games, like the Gran Turismo series, just use an entirely different button configuration (and make sure they don’t tell you about it).

The reason for this is, well, it’s not terribly obvious. The only explanation, and it is one that doesn’t hold any water, is that the programmers of the replay systems will frequently be entirely different from the main gameplay team.

Which leaves the question: why don’t replay coders use the same buttons as everyone else?

(Screenshots, erm, borrowed from Gamespot’s Grand Prix 4 coverage.)

Spyker Formula One (F1) HD widescreen wallpapers

Spyker F1 offers a free online magazine with their account of the racing weekend just gone along with other pictures and articles. Following the British Grand Prix, for example, magazine readers were among the first to learn that Christijan Albers had been fired, er, let go because a private sponsor didn’t pony up the dough.

The magazine also provides some nice high-res wallpapers each race. The following are simply 1920×1080 crops of the official 1920×1200 wallpapers that I personally liked.

You can view past issues of the magazine and subscribe to the current issue (it’s free) at www.spyker-magazine.com. I recommend it if you like F1, it only takes a few minutes to look through and it’s also a nice example of a well-done Flash presentation.

Adrian Sutil

Christijan Albers

Unknown Driver

 

Updated 28 July 2007: Second picture link fixed

Formula One (F1) HD widescreen wallpapers

	Really funky shot on the Renault R26 2006
	Wheeee! Ralf Schumacher hits Rubens Barrichello at Melbourne 2002
	One of the most iconic Formula One images of all time: Nigel Mansell gives Ayrton Senna a lift Silverstone 1991.

There will never be a James Allen Appreciation Page

James Allen is the Formula One commentator for British television channel ITV. His commentary is syndicated to numerous television stations around the world.

While he had to fill the none-bigger shoes of motor-sport journalist legend and greatest commentator of any kind of all time Murray Walker, James Allen is, without question, the worst motor-sport commentator on British television.

As an supreme example of how poor his commentary is, I am just watching the qualifying for the 2007 French Grand Prix and while current Formula One World Champion Fernando Alonso pulls into the pits with a terminal problem James Allen absolutely refuses to interrupt his own never-ending paragraph about the exact weight of fuel that is returned to the driver’s cars per lap of qualifying. The Alonso gearbox failure is the most important and dramatic development in the qualifying period.

This highlights one reason why his commentary is so poor. He spends most of his time not talking about what is happening now on track or on screen. He spends almost all of his time recapping and summarising and re-summarising what has happened before: in this race, in previous races, in qualifying.

This isn’t his only weakness. Allen is afflicted with a drone of a voice with little effective modulation. When he does modulate his voice (he does this twice in a race, once at the start “…Go!”and once at the end “…Wins!”) it sounds absolutely fake.

James Allen does not have the gift of the gab and he has no poetry. He also fails to convey the spirit and atmosphere of Formula One. There is no tension, fun or entertainment to be had from his commentary.

I don’t doubt he has a personal and genuine enthusiasm and love for Formula One and his job. I feel he views his position as a great priviledge. But for the good of ITV Formula One, James Allen should stand down as commentator.

There are two principle reasons why James Allen still has his job.

1. He is an ITV producer.
2. His co-commentator is the greatest of all time, Martin Brundle.

ITV would be better served employing Brundle as their principle commentator. He does have the gift of the gab, he does have a poetry to his extemporaneous speech and he brings fun, infectious enthusiasm and genuine appreciation to his commentary.

There is a Murray Walker Appreciation page. There are Martin Brundle Appreciation pages.

No-one would miss James Allen. There will never be a James Allen Appreciation page.

Forza Motorsport – My Cars – Ferrari 355 Challenge – Spyker F1 theme

Forza Motorsport – My Cars - Ferrari 355 Challenge - Spyker F1 theme

Being a big fan of metallic orange in racing games, it may come as no surprise that I really like the Spyker F1 team livery for 2007 which features their traditional orange broken up with silver. They are powered by Ferrari engines during this season and so when I won my first Ferrari in “Forza” I figured I would avoid the traditional red and paint it in the colours of the Spyker F1 team.

Largely this was as straightforward a job as it looks but there are a couple of nice details.

The principle Rotora logo adorning the side has black blocks behind it to make the inner text black. Normally, the text is transparent.

The Bridgestone B on the bonnet was made by using the Bridgestone logo supplied and covering “ridgestone” with a silver panel.

The only other details were that, once again, parts of the side are painted using the roof. Funky.

Problem

Then I hit a problem. The reference photographs I had used were of the pre-season livery. Once the season started Spyker politely altered their silveryness to black so as to make their car more distinguishable from the McLaren Mercedes (when viewed on television). I found this out after taking my photos so you can see the original silver next to my new black one. This wasn’t quite as simple as just changing the silver to black as the silver bits had black logos on. So I needed to find all-white logos. Hmm.

As I had plenty of credits and hadn’t upgraded the car in any way, I bought another F355 Challenge and copied the pattern across so I actually had both the black and silver available. This a great feature and a generous bonus.

• Spyker F1 website

Forza Motorsport – My Cars – Renault Sport Clio – Renault F1 theme

Forza Motorsport – My Cars – Renault Sport Clio – Renault F1 theme

Renault’s ING sponsorship for 2007 has produced a bland car thanks to it’s feeling predominantly white / yellow. I was much more interested in the 2006 model with the highly distinctive gold / dark blue / sky blue.

Remarkably I ran into a major problem with painting the Clio. You can’t paint the centre upright, the upper part of the door! While you probably wouldn’t notice unless someone pointed it, this meant that a dark blue stripe that should be between the gold on the roof and the sky blue of the door is missing. I only ran into this problem after I had nearly finished one side with the car colour set to gold. This meant changing the car colour to sky blue and then re-imagining the decorative construction based upon an entirely different colour. Fortunately I hadn’t produced a terribly complicated pattern but it was still a bit of a shock.

While I’ve tried to maintain the pattern and feel of the Renault F1 2006 car, I don’t feel I managed it. If you looked at it without knowing its inspiration, would you figure it to be a Renault F1 Clio? Anyway, this is a bright, striking car that looks great on track but I am a teensy bit dissatisfied with it and don’t really know why.

I later adjusted the side of the car to its current state. The original had the side pattern as basically square. The revised one has a wavy pattern and is much more interesting. I am much happier with the design now.