Truck: We Have Ignition
Pod Name: Ignit_mt.pod
Version: MTM2
Date: 14 July 2003


This is my special entry for the MTMG's 2003 Truck and Track Expo. Since I agreed to judge for the contest, I can't compete for outright honours, but because this is a community event with no declared prizes, judges are allowed (even encouraged) to enter and 'set the mood' to encourage everyone else, rookie or veteran. 

The name and overall theme and appearance for this truck comes from the advertising slogan that Ford Australia ran for 2001-2002. I always thought the phrase "We Have Ignition" was way cooler than anything else I'd heard before (or since, now that they've changed it again...), and have been planning to make a truck out of it for quite some time. That said, it came together in a fairly ad-hoc manner (virtually everything I did was an experiment), but turned out pretty good for it I think.

I started with my freshly-completed Tickford AUII XR8 ute truck model, which had been built from scratch as an independent project. To this I added a scratch-built bed canopy and mounted a scratch-built wing on top of it, while on the front I added a pair of specially-built replica "Ion Crystal" PIAA driving lights. The original twin-tailpipe exhaust was removed and a new side-exit, "wastegate"-style exhaust system, modelled after the type fitted to real racing cars, was fabricated and added to the underside of the truck.

The paint scheme is something that I'm really proud of, my aim was to keep to the limited colour range already employed in the "We have ignition" logos and it worked out well. I started by converting my original Falcon ute textures from red to a very very dark blue-green (it's practically black, but straight black generally doesn't work too well for this sort of thing). The dramatic lightning effects on the hood and fenders, and the wings around the Ford logo on the sides, were all carefully drawn by hand. It's mostly done with an airbrush and took every bit as long to do as you might think :)

To top it off, I added a completely custom animated exhaust flame. Animated flames have been done before, but those have typically been continual-burning type things, and only cycle through a half-dozen frames at most. With real race cars, however, the flames occur when unburnt fuel escapes into the exhaust pipe (usually when the driver lifts off the throttle, and the engine stops burning all the fule it gets) and ignites with open air, burning only relatively briefly, and this was the effect I wanted with my truck (I literally wanted to replicate the fire-breathing spectacle of V8 Supercars!). Now, I can't actually make the game show the flames only when you lift off the loud pedal, so the next best option is to fake it with an animation that burns on/off at random intervals. The result (after a fair amount of tweaking) is an animation composed of 240 frames that runs for 12 seconds, and alternately uses four 64x64 raws for the flame, plus an extra 'blank' for those periods when there is no flame.

All up, it comes to 1351 vertices for the body model, which is relatively lightweight (you can drive with water reflections turned on without crashing the game). However, all this uses a whopping 11 textures just for the body model (four 256x256 RAWs, seven 64x64 RAWs - five of which are used for the animation), and that's not even counting the custom lights and wheels. So, you might experience some lag with the truck, particularly if you run any computer-controlled opponents with it - although it generally worked fine for me, I was getting consistent (but short-lived) stutter off the start line, and frame skipping when I tried to pan the camera - but the reports I got back from testers virtually all said it ran fine, so hopefully you won't see any problems. (Thanks to Phineus, ZOtm_BigDOGGe, SLO_COPE, Rep Fan and Winterkill for their input as the aforementioned testers.)

I hope you enjoy this truck, it's been a joy for me to actually get something together when my hobby time is at a premium :)


Suggestions and comments welcome please.
You can e-mail me at d2smtm2@email.com
Check out my websites at http://mtm2.com/~d2s/

That's about all... have fun with this!

---Drive2Survive
"Live for the Ride. Drive to Survive."