Ok, so I've got a little project going. There's a lot of tracks that have been made by multiple modders and I'm trying to determine the best version of these particular tracks. I've basically downloaded every single mod track I can find. I've downloaded every track available on this thread, everything from the classics forum, every track on racedepartment, every track on club, and digging around on other forums and mod sites I've amassed a collection of 1173 tracks (I've deleted a few absolutely rancid terrible unfinished / never should have been released tracks mostly from racedepartment) and while I'm sure I don't have all of them, I probably have most of them ever released. I'm planning on publishing the findings when it's done, but so far I'm just up to the D's. I'm going in alphabetical order and have about 300 tracks I've tagged as "duplicate".
Methodology
I've been going through the giant list of tracks and finding duplicates. Tracks that have historical variants of them (like Le Mans 1991 and Le Mans 1967) aren't considered duplicates since they are definitely their own thing. I'm more thinking like the 3 different versions of Albert Park or Gilles Villeneuve I have that are all from the same (or similar enough) era. I'm noting the differences in how they drive, how accurate they are, do they have other track layouts, features like AI, notable bugs, how nice (or not) they look, and whether the newer versions of them appear to be reworks of previous versions, etc.
Output
My plan for the end product is to make one large (or several small) forum posts here with a little review of each track with it's different versions and to point out the strengths and weaknesses with each one from a player's perspective rather than from a modder's perspective because really I'm not that great at making mods. It's definitely not meant to be a platform to trash the worst stuff, but more of a project meant to highlight some of the best stuff and spark discussions. And it's just fun to try out track mods.
Legacy
For some reason a lot of these older tracks have no information about who made them, where they came from, what version they are, etc. I'd love to give recognition to the people who made this stuff, and to try and track down the lineage of this stuff (like earlier rfactor versions, etc).
Insight from the people who make this stuff
This thread is full of the people who either make this stuff or are closely associated with the people who make this stuff. I'd love to get more info on things that modders have done specifically when reworking older stuff. Like, the Daytona by Legion appears to be a much improved version of an older track made by someone else (please correct me if I'm wrong here). I'd love to know more details about what was changed, what was kept, stuff like that, especially for reworked tracks like that.
Do you care?
Is this something anyone here is interested in reading? I'm still gonna do it for myself because it's fun, but if no one here cares I'll crawl back into my hole and just do it for myself
I have all of these so I can put up the ones @MrB00 doesn't have
Thank you guys, also this idea for track curation is a great idea!
