ai pacenotes (rally) v0.5.2-alpha

Hey everyone!

I developed and tested the mod extensively on my sim rig and have tried to build the most authentic rally driving experience for BeamNG that I could. It should also work great with a controller or keyboard.

Here's the mod repo page: https://www.beamng.com/resources/ai-pacenotes-rally-stages-pacenotes-editor.27352/

You can always get a ZIP of the latest release on my github: alexebird/beamng-aipacenotes-mod/releases

Please report any bugs or issues in this forum thread.

Development has focused on one goal: make tools for creating great rally stages that are super fun to drive.

Let me know what you think! Suggestions and ideas are welcome.

 

This is amazing! It must've taken so much work! Trying it out right now

 

Does this mean I can create both stage and pacenotes in one go just be driving a certain route? That would be fantastic! Is it in the format "distance to next turn/next turn" lite 200 left 5 or 60 left 3?
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Sadly the plug and play part isn´t working for me. I click start and nothing happens - no countdown, no pacenotes, no time shown.

 

Thanks!!
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Oh no! I’m traveling at the moment, but I’ll fix it when I get back. Is there any red text in the game’s log? (Open the log window by hitting the backtick key, to the left of the “1” key) Sorry about that! This is why it’s alpha

Make sure the old version of the mod is disabled or uninstalled in the mods repo.

Creating a stage also involves using the Race Tool, same as a time trial mission, to define the waypoints. Waypoints can be pretty sparse — just enough to prevent course cutting — so this part isn’t very time consuming. It’s a good idea to automatically set the stage route on the same pass! I had not thought about that.

Currently the distance call is added after the corner, like “3 right, 50.” I could add an option to add it to the front instead!

 

^ Log window doesn´t open so I don´t know. I think the pacenotes should follow the flow of the stage, so first 70 straight then the corner. But this info isn´t that important (exept in fog) because if it is a straight, the driver can see and judge the distance to the next corner anyway.

 

Servus, now I managed to make the screenshot of the monitor window (Tilde isn´t too user friendly on a german keyboard so I had to change the keybind to make it appear).

 

Great, thanks. Looks like the level isn’t loading some assets that must have forgotten to include in the zip. I’m a little surprised those are preventing it from working though.

What stage isn’t working for you? Do any of the stages work? Thanks.

 

No nothing is working: Italy, Jungle Isl. Utah (the rest is mod maps I think). But always this message above.

 

Ah, I see those messages even when I drive the stages and everything is working. It’s looking for an optional camera path to use at the start screen to make it more cinematic.

The Conte Marlo stage does have the camera path file. Since that isn’t working, maybe there is another error. After you hit start, and nothing happens, can you please see if the log has anything? The expected behavior is after you hit start, there should be a voice countdown, with no visual countdown.

Someone else mentioned they were able to get it working with no issues. A useful thing to check would be to try to disable all other mods and see if it works. I know that can be annoying so no problem if that’s not a good option! Thanks for your help!

 

Unfortunately the same also with all mods disabled. I can now also try with an empty repo folder. This is all yellow and red text after loading (Conte Marlo) and failing to start.

 

Looking at the top of the log it looks like a vehicle spawn failed for something called “hute”. How are you starting the stage? There are two ways: (1) from the Scenarios menu, and (2) from freeroam.

For (1), the way the flowgraph works is that it first loads the level and default freeroam vehicle, then starts the flowgraph. The flowgraph code is what loads the default mission vehicle, which is the rally car. If the spawn of the default freeroam vehicle fails, I wonder if that could cause the problem.

Even if not, two other good tests would be to try starting the rally stage from freeroam, both with the default vehicle and with the current player vehicle.

Is your game set to German? I’ve only tested the mod with English so that would be a difference.

 

hute loads fine usually, it is the Hirochi Ute. I will try from freeroam. Mabe it´s something simple that´s so obvious that you don´t think about it in the first place. Yes the menu language is German.
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And simple (and embarrassing) it was: I had not only music on 0 in audio settings, but also "other". Now I can hear (although not understand LoL) the pacenotes!

 

OMG that’s a good one! Love it! This is a great piece of information to have discovered and I’ll be sure to include it in the documentation. Someone I worked with once told me: “computers only do what you tell them”

Would you be wanting German notes? Maybe the next step is to get a translation going. You could be the first! I only speak English so I haven’t tested that stuff too much. Google cloud supports German with their latest models so the voice should sound great.

 

Yes translation would be good. Even if you are good in english it takes these extra milli-seconds to process and translate it in your head - these milliseconds could be crucial. If you send me a list of the english keywords I could translate them and then let´s see how that sounds!

 

Hey, I'm the author of the other pacenotes mod.

https://www.beamng.com/resources/rally-mode-smart-co-driver-stages-with-pacenotes.21824/

Just wanted to say this is really great. You ended up implementing a lot of the stuff that i never got time to do. In fact, I don't really have time to work on my mod, period.

I just wanted to authorize you to reuse whatever you might find useful in my mod, and possibly help you integrate that stuff into your mod. You can probably reuse the coordinates and the pacenotes, just need to figure out how to port them into your system. I also have some nice samples you can use, including multi-language ported from RBR, which is abandonware, so maybe you could publish with no issue.

 

Hey, thanks, that means a lot! That’s really generous of you. That sucks you don’t have the time right now, but that’s life I guess. Rally Mode has been huge for moving the game toward its destiny of being a great rally sim.

I referenced your code a good amount to learn how stuff works and get ideas, so that was very helpful.

I’d really like to get the distance and velocity note triggering logic integrated. I just went with the simple and stupid method of a static trigger to start but dynamic would be ideal.

I can write a tool to convert rally mode stages to AIP formats. If that gets us 80% of the way then good enough. I can do the rest manually.

The other big thing that comes to mind is marketing, for lack of a better word. I’ve been feeling more like AI pacenotes isn’t a great name. It doesn’t indicate that you can drive rally stages, whereas Rally Mode is nice and obvious.

I’m not sure what the best approach is going forward. I know there are a handful of other people actively working on rally related stuff for the game. It would be nice to get everyone connected and working in the same direction. Right now it’s all separate, with different mods and different discords, etc.
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Every millisecond matters!

Actually you don’t have do manual translation, and there aren’t any keywords. The way it works is, there is a tool convert English pacenotes to another language using the Google translate API. Then the text to speech automatically takes care of creating the pacenote audio for the new language.

The big question is whether Google translate produces realistic sounding notes in other languages. So I can generate the German notes, then if you try it out and see if they sound good, great. If they don’t, then the translation would have to be done manually.

 

Idea for a rally pacenote creator UI
it would be helpfull if you can create the right pacenote when you drive and just click which you want in pacenote creator UI, the best way to creat a proper pacenote!
Just a idea for you!

 

That’s a good idea! I can see that being useful if someone doesn’t want to use voice.

 

One UI like this would be good to create all the checkpoints manually like lellolillili rally mod use, but without write in text files and so on, all thet work
UI would do it, and you could use lellolillili pacenote voice.

 

So where did that screenshot come from? Those are really nice icons.

I’m imagining that if those were buttons, then they could be set on a waypoint. Depending on which buttons are set, that would determine the pacenote text.