What a busy week!

Greetings fellow MMG fans. My apologies to you all for taking such a long time to update my blog, but boy has it been a busy period for me, especially this last week.

With the initial release of the MMG F1 2007 Mod Server Edition, many were wondering what most of the group would be working on now, well we've already told you about focusing more on 1991 and also finalizing the F1 2007 Mod Public Edition release.

This past week for myself has been spent outside of MMG work for my actual company products which are in pre-development. Spending the week writing up documentations on design and development of an MMORPG has kinda taken its toll on me and it will be great to be back onto MMG work from Monday.

I have however kept track of MMG work and whilst I have not had the time to personally put some hard work in to the MMG departments this week, I have still been overseeing the work thats being done, and all the staff members are progressing as well as they can.

As some of you may know the old (last years) MMG 1991 mod CLOSED beta was leaked on the net. We endorse everyone to not support the leak or download it, in fact we appeal to fans and non-fan's of MMG to report any leaks to us. To those of you who have tried it, what you saw is probably the most offencive thing ever done in this community by one of its members. It is just appalling that there are people in this community that will just stop at nothing then to ruin things not only for the community but for the creators too. But we won't be detered from it, and we won't quit our mods simply because some idiotic person wants to leak our old work.

The 1991 mod is progressing. Right now we're waiting on Juandi to get done with mapping something for another mod so he can begin the re-mapping of the 1991 cars, we have several painters waiting in line to paint the cars once the mapping is completed, as well as painters for the helmets. This will still take some time but we are working on the cars we wish to release in a small demo first so we can give you all something to enjoy before the full mod is out due to the time it will take. We're also re-doing all the in'game processes to select the options we want the cars to have so they can be at the same quality as the 2007 mod cars.

Having learnt much from the 2007 F1 Mod, we're very much in line with what the do's and don'ts are for rFactor modding and we're hoping to have a relatively bug free mod, but please don't quote me on forums saying that I said that we will have a bug free mod, because I am saying that we're HOPING we will have a bug free mod.

One of the new painters in MMG known as JR has been an excellent help in the area for painting. He did some adjustments to the paints for the Ferrari to show us what he could do and I can assure you that you will all be impressed with the 1991 car graphics, as we have a very strong painter lineup selected to paint these cars. I would also like to take this opportunity to welcome Mira who is one of the rare few females you would find in race simulation modding today. Mira has joined us for Helmet and Livery painting, not only to extend her skills but to also be apart of MMG and our mods. It is a pleasure for us to have her and to see that MMG mods appeal even to the opposite sex, its good to see more females involved in not only sim-racing games but also sim-modding.

As for the Safety car. It was mentioned that the safety car was not used in 1991. However the game programming still requires a safety car. I mean we could remove the safety car but then we'd have nothing to replace it with. The 1991 season had a very complex set of rules, of which rfactor cannot incorporate too much of. One person mentioned about the red flag system, whilst that was an all well and good system in real life, trying to simulate that in rfactor would not only be wrong, but very frustrating for players. Especially league admins. I'll explain why.

rFactor does not have the implementation of stopping and starting a session using the red flag options. If a session is to be stopped in rfactor then it requires that session to be restarted from scratch. For leagues, this is a nightmare as it means having all drivers remove themselves from the server, have the server refresh the game by closing it out and restarting it, re opening the room, and re-adding the drivers, then re adding the qualifying order if the red flag occured in qualifying, and it would just be chaotic. Not to mention if it happened during a race, you would not be able to restart from the number of laps left, or have the drivers in the order they stopped in before the red flag. Due to this we instigate the safety car which is coded into rfactor, we were thinking of modelling a 1991 mercedes or bmw or something of that year so that the safety car would look to the age of the mod, but instead to not waste time with the initial release we will be using the MMG F1 2007 Mod safety car in the 1991 Mod.

As for the menu, we will be continuing to use the rfactor blue menu as we did with the MMG F1 2007 Mod. I am not a fan on changing the menu's but the rfactor blue menu is the best menu out there in my view for rfactor. It was created by pain-less and you can acquire it here if you don't have it already.

http://www.rfactorcentral.com/detail.cfm?ID=rFactor%20Blue

I do also want to apologise to pain-less as I don't believe we gave rightful credit to him for the menu in our 2007 mod credits. We will be sure to do so in the expansion release and also in any other mod we use it on. I hope its ok with you pain-less and I apologise that you were not asked first, we assumed it being an rf addon that we could use it, but rushing as we were to release the mod, we forgot to add you to the credits. My apologies as I really love that menu and respect your work and would never claim it as MMG's. We're very proud and honoured to use it in our mods and if you have no objections we hope to continue using it, but if you don't want us to, then please let me know.

We're looking into many things for the 1991 mod. What you can expect? Well...lets see here...

The initial release of the mod will contain the drivers that participated for each team in the first GP of the year. We will have our own sounds of course, and the car paints will be of course from that year. What we then plan on doing is working on the expansion pack to add all the driver changes for that year and all the car changes for that year (be it models or liveries). This way we can give a more complete mod, but I know many of you will be asking, well how will the game know which drivers to use? ahh well, let me answer that.

For one we will be having a look at trying to force drivers (except player driver) for each GP, but that would only work for our tracks, so its not the best option. The best option I believe is rfactor's very own opponent selecter. When you choose to race in a test day, race day or season, you can select which opponents you want to have in the race/season etc. From there you can add the drivers you want and remove the drivers you don't want from that season. So if you prefer to have Michael Schumacher and Andrea De Cesaris in Jordan instead of Alex Zanardi and Andrea De Cesaris, then you can. Or maybe you'd want Roberto Moreno and Alex Zanardi instead of the other two drivers who piloted the Jordan that year. You can select your field for the season as you wish it to be.

We're looking into more details of the 1991 mod to make it more enjoyable. The 1991 mod is a special season to many of us, especially us Senna fans! So you can be sure that MMG is doing its utmost best to make this mod as perfect as we can.

Another note is that we're re-modelling the tires also on the cars. We wanted to upgrade some of the tire models as we felt they could be done better, hopefully they will impress like our 07 tires did.

I guess that will be all for the mod work for now. As for me, I have to continue my work throughout the weekend and then on Monday get back stuck into MMG departments. This week has been a tiring one for me. Our host servers were down for a few days with DNS troubles and that resulted to a league I host being down too. I apologise to them for that and hope all is well now that everything is working top notch again.

After having spent the week on that, I spent a few hours each day on catching up on MMG progression to ensure things are still going well and to place members who had finished their areas to new areas to work on, things were kept in order and kept rolling pretty well.

Another thing to note my attention is all this rumors of track stealing. As for FrankBR's tracks being used, we had permission to use them and we did so, but then he got upset that we released it, I'm sorry but a group does not ask permission to use and modify a track just to keep it on the backburner, they ask for permission as they want to release it in their mod, unfortunately deals with FrankBR didn't hold through as he decided to revoke the permission, but we're taking a different approach to acquiring the selfsame track frankie boy converted from the GP4 creators in order to release our version of it. Hopefully it will fall through.

The latest rumor that will appear on the agenda is the Bahrain release on F1Mods.com. You'll no doubt have CTDP start accusing that it is copied from their Bahrain, but then, when have you known CTDP to not accuse a mod group of stealing? they think they are the begin all and end all of modding and that everything belongs to them. Well unfortunately for them, modding does not revolve around them, and our Bahrain track is a legitimate, permission granted, NON CTDP CONTENT USING track which we will not remove and CTDP can just accept the fact that they are wrong or keep arguing over a track that is not theirs.

I have to admit that all these accusations and rumors get to me at times. Its petty and tiring to have to deal with people who believe everything created by anyone else is theirs.

Oh and lest not forget the GP4 mod group that is now back at claiming that our 1991 cars are theirs after we spent posts and posts proving to them the latest mod cars are not and Cherry the modeller of the 1991 cars has shown viable proof of all his car modelling. None of the cars in the MMG 1991 mod NOW are used from other groups. In the beginning we had permission from another group to use a few of their cars but due to all these accusations in the past we said hell to that and had cherry model his own which he has done. Its unbelievable what mod groups have to go through. You get two mod groups make the same track and they will both squabble over it, or one of them will say the other stole it. Its the same friggin track, it will look the same, it will have the same logo's on the billboards. When its the same track or same car, how do you expect it to look different? Sighs...

In all, as the leader of MMG I more often then not get blamed or flamed on as the bad guy when one of my members does something wrong. I as an individual, as the leader of MMG try to take the appropriate actions to ensure the rightful permissions to using others work is taken before we use it (except for the 07 blue menu from pain-less) which was not added to the mod by me but by another member working in that area, but again I apologise to him for not having asked him first. I try to acquire permissions the right way and after I do, when the product is ready to release I get shafted by the person who gave the permission, and that makes me look bad to the community. It is not my fault if people change their minds, all I can do is find another way or rectify the situation myself. It seems more people are trying to screw MMG more then help it and thats just not on. Which is why I am using less and less products from the community.

I would like to thank ISI however for giving us permission to use any of their tracks and even modify them to the requirements needed for our mods. It is a pleasure to see that the company itself at least is not like independant modders who turn their back on groups and change moods to suit their needs. So thank you ISI for the permission and we hope to do you proud.

Man this was a long post, but its been so long since my previous one. I had a lot to say I guess. I thank each and every one of you for your continued support to MMG. It not only boosts my motivation as the leader, but it boosts the motivation of all the hard working and dedicated members of MMG who work so very hard to make these mods for your enjoyment. I thank all of you who read and post comments on my blog and I hope you continue supporting and enjoying the posts I make here. Now that I am back on MMG work on Monday, you can be sure to expect more posts from now.

As for this weekend, I will be finishing up on the MMORPG documentation and enjoying the race at Bahrain. GO KIMI!!! OR KUBICA!!!

I hope you all enjoy the race also, may you all have a wonderful weekend and week to come.

Regards.

-Yanden Shadowstalker : Darkness is my eternal bond.