I'm pleased to present to you a new 2011 mod for GP4.
At the beginning of the year, I began compiling a list of mods and trying to make it easy to download them again. I was also looking at some of my unfinished work, and saw some gaps that I could potentially fill. I had a base 2011 mod, I had a 2011 Ferrari that needed to be painted, and with various 2011 mods now unavailable, why not create one myself? How hard can it be, I thought? Most of the work is already done, right?
If you've played with my 1994 mod, you will know I don't do mods by halves. Whilst the 1994 mod has many complexities found in the 11th Team coding, this mod is bursting at its seams with content and choices. 2011 saw so much content released for GP4, for better or for worse, that I wanted to include as much of it as I can, but even I couldn't possibly include everything.
It's a great loss to the community since Kedy89 took his decision to remove his mods from the downloads section, and I can fully sympathise with his decision. However, I had an empty base mod that I created and released back in 2011, and I've decided to start filling it. Whilst there will inevitably be some crossover with Kedy89's work, I've tried my best to create my work from scratch or from other sources where possible.
I wanted to thank MailsonTeles, SergioNG and KerleyF1 for sharing their archives with me. I also had access to TomMK's Gp4 Central mod made for low resolution computers, littleone90's mod that wasn't released to the public which included mostly 2010 Codemaster cars updated by NickJW and Tiko.BigBrother, a long time moderator at Grandprixgames.org, also created an unreleased mod. SergioNG's Megapacks are a fantastic compilation, but only comes in Spanish and it is missing a list of authors, and can be obtained via GP4Forever. I believe mods existed by Josekast, leomp10 and brudu92, but looking at the contents, I don't believe I've missed anything. I wanted to thank NickJW and mclarenaustralia for their 2011 download lists that helped my find content I was missing. It's sad only one of those mods survived and is available on my downloads page, however I hope to honour their work in this mod by including some elements of their work in my own. I also wanted to thank F1Virtual, Josekast and Jcaranti for allowing me to include much of their varied content into this mod.
Tracks
The trackpack is integrated with the CSM side of the mod itself, with only empty TSM profiles in place for it to load.
One reason for doing it this way is to get the pitbox integration working properly. So whether you pick HRT or Virgin as your 11th Team, it should patch the pitboxes and muppets with the team of your choice. The limitation with this is that you have to load the CSM mod one track at a time, you can't load all the tracks in one.
Included are tracks from the guys at F1Virtual, Prblanco, Gildoorf, Schueyfan and others, who continue to create premium quality tracks.
KTC also created a number of new tracks around that time and Yeongam, New Delhi/Buddh, and Yas Marina are included in this pack.
Other great track creators drt01, Jcaranti, Josekast, Tumyeto, Tojepo, Plodekk and Neil Caine's work are also featured. Let's not forget some of the foundations laid by guys such as TTM, Ricardo Lampert, MarioB, Erwin_78, btone, Lo2k and Cleberpister. I've likely missed some guys out, but it can't be underestimated how much work goes on to create these tracks and updates, it requires a true collaborative effort and they have my utmost respect and admiration.
Cars
With the Codemasters series of F1 games beginning in 2010, it was the popular thing to take content from them and stick it into GP4. 2011 was filled with 2010 cars updated to 2011, until the 2011 game was released and then those cars were converted. In this mod you'll find Josekast's conversions with lots of track specific variations added with help from a few of his friends. These cars were the ones
You'll also find conversions from Jucksman. I offer these alternatives because, in his words 'all cars follow true-to-life dimensions, ride height, rake and wheel base. I tried to position the drivers body as realistically as possible'.
There are some alternative conversions done by the RSCT guys, Gezere, Excalibur, Isaint and others.
There are some conversions from the F1MG mod from rFactor, which offer a nice alternative.
There are scratch made cars, particularly many versions of the Ferrari, my own included. Mpad, Michael Sandae (Dutch_Can), The Dark Listener (Saloman) all have their cars included to varying degrees of accuracy.So in the CSM menu, there's a significant section given over to selecting which one you prefer, and you can swap and mix between the version your choice of car.
Because of the large number of carshapes and textures to include, I've not provided lods and I've not given the option of lower resolution textures. This is purely a space saving decision, so sorry low spec computer users - the GP4 Central mod available on my downloads page caters for you.
As you can imagine, this was a lot of work, whittling through what cars to include and which to exclude, finding what cars are still available from what is sadly lost, and each car needs individual GP4 Tweaker position files. Where possible, I've included readme files for the cars that I could find, but not all of them had them but I've tried to credit all the original authors.
Hopefully this mod will satisfy the purists who prefer scratch made content, whilst those who don't mind using items from the Codemasters game will receive the quality they bring.
Fongu's updates
Other than sourcing and compiling what already exists, there's new things that I've contributed to this mod too.
There's some track specific liveries for my Ferrari F150th Italia included exclusively with this mod.
Oggo allowed us the opportunity to mod GP4 in ways not possible back in 2011 and many of the changes below are as a result of Oggo's breakthroughs.
You'll find each team has individual 3D rim shapes. There's a large number of people who worked on the 2011 rims, but the rim shapes themselves I've taken them from Lee who released a 2010 pack of 3D rim shapes. I've amended it to fit it with 2011 textures and tyre shapes by Excalibur, Hega, Vesuvius and Soulbringer (I hope I caught all contributing authors). In truth, I think the tyres and rims are scaled a little too small, but it's too big a job to raise all the cars to cater for it.
You'll find each driver has their correct helmet shape, as they were originally designed. You'll find Daimon and MDBSnake's great helmet shapes paired with the correct driver in this mod. There's some stunning helmets in this collection made by DaiMOn, Grl48, Nick9320, pummba, Josekast, Jaunental and Kerleyf1.
There's a great set of in-cockpit visors made by Enrico Neidhardt (madleonix) who released them in the original GP4 format. I've converted these to GP4 Tweaker visors. I really like this set as it's not as intrusive as other versions, so you can see more of the cockpit and steering wheel.
I've made some changes to Josekast, Jcaranti, ramf1v and renault#1fan's cockpit taken from the Codemasters game. I've fixed the mirrors, rearranged some of the object names and I've created a Virgin cockpit texture. I've decided not to include cockpit shape and textures by Guillermo, nor the textures painted on KSor's cockpit, again this was mostly a space saving decision. Coupled with Jcaranti, Josekast and NickJW's steering wheels, I really like the in-cockpit view. For the generic steering wheel option, I've included Zifox's great HD generic wheel.
I've added a new collision file, meaning collisions with other cars are now more realistic and there should be less clipping when you touch other cars.
Big thanks to 32bobo32 who created new Marshalls and Event Director textures for this mod, they are truly excellent. This adds to Josekast's work on the pitcrews. I've decided against included new 3D pitprop items, due to team specific pitprop textures already created with the original 3d shapes. What I've done though is replace any low poly versions of the marshalls and pitcrews and replaced them with the standard versions.
Oggo's work on a CAP converter means much of what used to be in the Patch folder is now included in the Patch.ini file. In real terms it makes no difference, but it's a tidier solution. Included are Prblanco's code changes, such as no refuelling, cars starting with full fuel loads, monaco pit lane tweaks, and car weight patches.
Menu Videos & GPaedia
As these are large files in themselves, I've split my video backgrounds out from the main install as an optional update.
Download them and put them in ...2011 Fongu\Data\Menu folder and CSM will do the rest.
This link is also there if you right click on the mod in CSM.
If you're a fan of the in-game GPaedia, I've included ones by Jcaranti, Kedy89 and petrus created to bring it up to date with 2011.
Physics and Performances
Thanks to Gitanes for his track specific performance files and they are made for Cyberracer's physics files. I've included his notes, which can be accessed by right clicking on the CSM mod.
There were other people working on physics and performance files, TomMK and Phantaman in particular, however Phantaman's data is based off one race, and Tom's can be found in the GP4Central mod, so I've decided not to include them in this one.
GPXPatch
There's lots of fantastic graphics made to work with GPXPatch.
Part of the problem at the time was that many of these were made based on a 1024x768 resolution that doesn't stretch properly for larger wide screens commonly used today.
Josekast and The Dark Listener created a great base HUD, which many others have since worked on. 32bobo32 created his own fantastic versions too.
Included at b-tone and Ruboy's def panel, present in almost every mod, F1Virtual and mclarenaustralia graphics updates and additional information.
Young Driver Test
I've included a bonus little test variant. It's based around the Yas Marina Young Driver test. I've included the Williams pre-season, all blue, test livery on the 2010 car, and Ferrari's huge T-camera added to Jucksman's car. Some helmets have been taken from the GP2 mod, and I've added some very quick helmets for the missing drivers. They are just a place holder, I didn't have the time to give it the attention I usually do on my helmets. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this little alternative.
Installation notes
This is a stand alone mod, so you don't need any previous installations.
Welcome to Fiorano in sunny Italy, host of the pre-season test for the 2022 Time Trial League.
We're using the 2015 release of Fiorano for GP4, beautifully created by the F1Virtual team.
We have seven participants at this test session, with nine in total having signed up for the season so far. Newcomers, JCaranti and Hinyaldee joined the action alongside returnees, Gildoorf, Prblanco, 32bobo32, Carl_Gpgames and me, Fongu. Check out the link to the league on the menu bar at the top for more entrants.
The Fiorano track is a tricky little track. You start off with the longest straight on the course, and you break heavily into turn 1, but it opens up on the exit allowing you to pick up speed for the fast S bends, not quite flat out so quite challenging. Then you are back on the brakes in a turn for the tight turn 4, which leads you up hill, over the start/finish straight in this figure of 8 configuration. There's lots of room on the exit kerb. Turn 5 is another tight right hander, that leads you downhill into the tightest hairpin, it's difficult to get the car slowed down. Flat out, with a slight feather in turn 7 before a long sweeping turn 8 that leads you back to the finish line. A fairly short lap, but lots of different kinds of corners, as you'd expect from a dedicated test track.
Rule Changes
New season means a tweak to the rules. Instead of finishing a lap with 1 lap of fuel remaining this was switched to starting the lap with at least 2 laps of fuel onboard. This sounds a minor change, but it caught out 32bobo32 who started his fastest lap with 1.9 laps of fuel. Thankfully it didn't affect his position, and this is only testing after all.
There's also a change in the track limit rules this year, with the white lines all around the track defining the boundaries, as it should. Last season the boundaries included kerbs, so this will be quite a shift (certainly in my approach on the wheel). The main test in Fiorano for this is on the exit of turn 7, where there's plenty of kerb to run wide on, but now you have to keep at least one wheel on the white line.
Setups
For the first time, we have access to everyone's set up data, thanks for Prblanco for compiling and sharing the data. These are the setups used on the fastest, submitted laps.
We can see there's a fairly equal spread of inputs, with the four 'switched' drivers using the keyboard, whilst the analog drivers are all on wheels. 32bobo32 did do a few laps on the wheel, but still needs more practice as he couldn't match his pace on the keyboard.
FW/RW are the wing levels, the majority of us running more front wing than rear, with Hinyaldee being the only exception. Gildoorf is running the lowest downforce settings, whilst I'm running the most wing, as I explained above.
RB/FB are the brake balance settings, are you can see how much further rearward Gildoorf and my setups are. Carl_gpgames is running brakes extremely near the front.
1G-7G are the gear ratios. Everyone is running seven gears, and the seventh gear ratio is really based on how much rear wing you're running. For me, I went for quite small differences in the lower gear ratio range, as I say, I felt this helped me out of the slower corners (whether it actually transpires that way or not I'm not sure!).
The top speed is at the end of the start/finish straight, with Gildoorf having a good advantage on that front, with Carl_gpgames and myself some 7 kph slower.
Fongu's notebook
For me personally, being pre-season, I was looking to shake off the cobwebs and just enjoy driving again. I was on the a keyboard, thinking a mid-downforce setup with a good balance would be a good mix between the high speed corners and the low speed ones. I also tried a very rear-ward brake balance as Gildoorf used to good effect last season to help with those pesky slower corners. I was happy to set a lap under 1 minute with that set up, as I found the limits of the car, learned good lines, good braking points, trying different techniques at different corners. I also experimented a bit with my gear ratios, helping me accelerate quickly out of the slow bends, and that gained me a few tenths. As I discovered last season, I can't simply translate my setup on the keyboard straight to a wheel, so I was interested to see Jcaranti trying out my setup on his early runs. I then went pretty much full downforce, I wanted extra braking and grip in the tight corners, and more speed through the higher speed ones. For me, this gave me much more confidence around the corners and I found around half a second. Overall I was happy to concentrate a bit of time on setup work and understanding how that affects my driving, and ultimately pace on track.
Results
There was an air of excitement at Fiorano, looking to see if there was any change in the pecking order, trying to catch a glimpse of the new cars and new helmets. But as always with testing, there are those struggling to get run time, whilst others were pounding around fine tuning their cars. It's difficult to know whether the times are truely representative of the competitive order or not, or whether some teams were sandbagging. We'll only truly know when we get to the first competitive round.
Purple times are fastest of anyone.
Green times are personal best times.
For those who uploaded more than one lap, the yellow times means that there was a faster sector time in one of the other laps that were slower overall.
Quickest in all sectors is Jcaranti, who sets a blistering pace on a wheel, over half a second from the rest of the field. This is surely a warning shot to the rest of the field for the start of the season proper. Congratulations to Jcaranti.
I'm pleased to get a time in the 58's on the keyboard - I wanted to use the test session to understand set up a bit more, and maximising it for my driving style.
Gildoorf sets the third fastest time, struggling a bit with the final sector. Prblanco, on the wheel, is just slightly behind his fellow compatriot, with only the top four able to set a sub 1 minute lap time.
32bobo32 was also in the 59.7s with his disqualified lap, but he'll be pleased with with his 1:00.00 lap time.
Hinyaldee ran with no driver aids on the keyboard (you can't turn off steering aid on the keyboard easily (though it is possible in GP4Tweaker)), a brave decision but a lot of his time was spent controlling the car. Spectacular indeed, but unfortunately not particularly quick.
Carl_gpgames was able to set a time on the wheel, but with a lack of on track running time is confined to the back of the field.
Reactions
Prblanco: "Congratulations @JCaranti for the win and the three best sector times!"
Jorge: "Massive admiration to @Fongu understanding his control of driving. Many of the tracks i havent raced nor tested in years and others are brand new to me like Saudi Arabia. Thank you very much for everything."
Fongu: "Congrats @Jcaranti on your impressive preseason pace. I look forward to future duels ad the season commences."
Hinyaldee: "I need to up my game!"
Prblanco was able to offer some helpful advice to Hinyaldee's interesting driving technique...
Prblanco: "Two things seemed very unusual to me about your laps, first is that you drive without F7 Traction Control with a non-analog control scheme, which seems very difficult to control; second is that you use more rear wing than front wing, which induces understeer. Maybe try playing around with these?"
It's good to see the banter remains strong going into the new season...
32bobo32: "Why am i fast in S3 😂😂😂?"
Fongu: "New season, new rules, new @32bobo32 habits 🤣!"
Gildoorf: "Amazing S3 @32bobo32, wish I could be that fast, I simply had no idea how to draw the best line at last turn. Rear brake bias make the car bounce so agressively to the left"
We hope Duffer will return, we haven't seen him since the middle of 2021
Duffer: "For me the motor isn't in the car yet 😀"
Personally I was just happy to get a clean lap in, but watching the replay back, it just seems like a leisurely Sunday drive, not really braving the limits, just smooth and serene. It certainly didnt' feel like when I was setting the time, as 32bobo32 shares the same sentiment:
32bobo32: "Very smooth drive! All replays give me a smooth drive feeling, It seems so easy to reach the time... When in cockpit the feeling is the opposite 😂"
Testing Photography
With no official TV available during the test, some car liveries remain a mystery. However there was some leaked images from the test that I can present to you.
Carl_gpgames running a message of support for Ukrainians
Fongu in his new car on his way to the second fastest time
This is reported in Autosprint magazine as a possible picture taken inside PinnaGP factory 🤔
We look forward to the new season starting up in a few weeks time. It's certainly whetted the appetite of some of the competitors. There's still time to sign up if you're interested, full details are available on the GrandPrixGames forum thread: https://www.grandprixgames.org
