About the Course Maker: Point-to-Point Course Generation

[jontikis]

Okay, to make a long story short.

Recently I ended up in the well-known "The Cutting Room Floor" forum, reading about some of the cool and hidden stuff in Gran Turismo 5.
At some point I reached the section about the game's Course Maker and the first thing that I immediately paid attention to was this:

"While point-to-point courses generated with the Course Maker functionality are not unused themselves (as the Gran Turismo Rally Special Event uses this functionality for all courses in its events), the ability for the player to generate their own point-to-point courses is. A method to generate point-to-point courses using the Course Maker is to extract one of the courses from a replay file that was saved during the Gran Turismo Rally Special Event and then overwrite one of the saved courses in the game data files.

As it turns out, the game fully supports point-to-point courses. They are fully configurable from within the Course Maker, and can even be configured to have just a single section. In addition, when the player test drives the course, the game will set the test drive session to only a single lap, ending the test drive session once they reach the end of the point-to-point course. These types of courses can be adjusted and saved like normal as well, and can thus be used in other game modes such as Arcade Mode and Practice."

The point-to-point course generator was a very wanted request for the majority of the community since the very early months of the game. It was seen as an option in a pre-release screenshot of the actual mode but, unfortunately, the developers scrapped it from the initial release version.

Now, to prevent any misunderstanding, I realise that telling me how to actually make this functional may be against the AUP, but I'd be very grateful if somebody could at least PM me and give me a small tutorial, so I could try to experiment a bit with this type of course generation. Maybe @elston87 could give me a piece of advice on that.



Thanks in advance!

 

[GT235]

Cool, one more find, good job !

 

[elston87]

I don't think it's against the AUP to at least explain how I did it.

No matter the case, you need a modified console to replace existing Course Maker course files on your hard drive. Once that's established, the method that I've found was saving a replay from one of the Gran Turismo Rally Special Events and then extracting the course from the replay; when you save replays on Course Maker courses, a copy of the course file is saved inside the replay, so when you export your replay save data to the XMB, copy it over to a USB flash drive, then decrypt the data, you can search for the course file inside the replay data, extract it, then replace one of your existing courses on your PS3's hard drive. You can then manipulate it within the Course Maker as you please.

There's one thing worth mentioning. For the Advanced and Expert level Gran Turismo Rally Special Events (level 15 and 20 respectively), those events use randomly generated courses (they don't have a fixed seed number, so the resulting generated courses are never the same), so if you were to do the above procedure with a course file extracted from a replay of the two aforementioned events, no course will ever be the same, even if you flip back and forth between two courses inside the Course Maker...unless you Test Drive it. Once you test drive it, it calculates a seed number for the course, allowing you to save it, just in case you liked a particular design that was generated. The game parameter files have the randomizer enabled for the aforementioned events, whereas the Beginner tier event (Level 10) has the randomizer disabled, and instead has a fixed seed setting, so the courses featured throughout will always be the same; this applies not just to point-to-point courses but also circuit ones, too.

 

[jontikis]

I don't think it's against the AUP to at least explain how I did it.

No matter the case, you need a modified console to replace existing Course Maker course files on your hard drive. Once that's established, the method that I've found was saving a replay from one of the Gran Turismo Rally Special Events and then extracting the course from the replay; when you save replays on Course Maker courses, a copy of the course file is saved inside the replay, so when you export your replay save data to the XMB, copy it over to a USB flash drive, then decrypt the data, you can search for the course file inside the replay data, extract it, then replace one of your existing courses on your PS3's hard drive. You can then manipulate it within the Course Maker as you please.

There's one thing worth mentioning. For the Advanced and Expert level Gran Turismo Rally Special Events (level 15 and 20 respectively), those events use randomly generated courses (they don't have a fixed seed number, so the resulting generated courses are never the same), so if you were to do the above procedure with a course file extracted from a replay of the two aforementioned events, no course will ever be the same, even if you flip back and forth between two courses inside the Course Maker...unless you Test Drive it. Once you test drive it, it calculates a seed number for the course, allowing you to save it, just in case you liked a particular design that was generated. The game parameter files have the randomizer enabled for the aforementioned events, whereas the Beginner tier event (Level 10) has the randomizer disabled, and instead has a fixed seed setting, so the courses featured throughout will always be the same; this applies not just to point-to-point courses but also circuit ones, too.

Ohh I hoped I could use an OFW console and make it work, but that's not possible I guess. Nevertheless, thank you very much for the info and the tips!