Here's another dump of a lot of little things that I've been ticking off the infinite to-do list, one by one.
I took another look at the exhaust on the E55 AMG which is painted body colour, and unlike 4 years ago it's actually now a trivial fix with modern tools, so I sorted it out. It looks like it was mistakenly marked as recolourable, so when PD made the other paint colours from the silver base, it was tinted to match. While I was at it, I decided to fix the squashed night headlights too:
I also did a pass through all of the JGTC GT300 cars, as nearly all of them have the road car's headlights pasted onto them at night rather than using the actual lights fitted to the racecars. This meant removing the popups on the Momo MR2, and illuminating the little spotlights in the headlight covers for the others:
The three models of Suzuki Wagon R have quite different bodykits stock, but when race modified all three of them get the slatted Aero RS grille. Now, I've copied over the grille designs from the original cars to the RMs for a bit of variety, with my favourite being from the '97 base model:
One of the bigger jobs recently was revising the Nissan 200SX '95 - unlike virtually every other regional rebrand in the game, the '95 and '98 200SX are actually separate cars to the equivalent Silvia K's, and modified to look like UK models. The '98 is spot on, with the correct front and rear bumpers and side indicators, however the '95 has the front end from a Silvia K's with the optional Navan bodykit. The 200SX had a less aggressive kit, with standard-fit foglights for a bit of premium trim. I've reworked the bumper entirely to look more like a UK car - it's not perfect due to the low-poly model, but it's better than being totally wrong. Here's a before and after of a Navan-kitted Silvia K's and a 200SX:
Now it's a noticeably unique car, as it should be:
I also spotted however that the 200SXes were carbon copies of the Silvia in terms of physics, so now they're proper EU spec with about 10% less power, a bit more weight, and longer gearing for autobahn cruising:
Something on my long-term list has been to go through Arcade mode and replace the completely inaccurate displayed stats for the fictional rally cars with something closer to the performance that they actually have. For a lot of cars this is a 70-100hp jump, and less weight than they previously claimed. The physics haven't changed, but now the menus don't lie:
One more, and this is a tiny one, entering a license in UK English no longer claims that your launch speed is in mph:
This isn't everything either, there have been other little fixes such as painting the missing exhaust back onto the Legnum Super VR-4 which are too minor or boring to show off, but work towards eliminating all of the known issues.
Is it possible to adjust the power levels of the rally and JGTC cars to better reflect their real-world counterparts?
It's possible, but the problem is that it's not just one figure to change from 460 to 300. The whole torque curve for each car would need to be remade, and in general it's not possible to find data on how the real torque curve would look, and it's something that would require all of them to be changed for consistency and balance. Polyphony seem to have sort of made up what they think the racecars would perform like without air restrictors, and gone with that. The later games do the same, so I can't even backport the data from them.
