Modding and restoration discussion

[just_kaybee]

The actual release version of the tool is much, much more reliable, doesn't need all of the weird and arcane object and material names, and doesn't destroy existing models when using Blender.

gotcha, thanks! i'll fix my links, play around with it to familiarize myself and update my guide once i have a better understanding, and i'll incorporate your notes on texture stuff as well.

 

[Boxout]

i've been helping out with a-spec modding (mostly modeling/texturing) for a few months now.

I been experimenting with modding on top of a-spec on the last couple of days and I hit a roadblock where after I recompile my changes the game starts acting weird, the demo replays have cars not moving or fully acting erratic, some rally ghosts are broken and the most notable issue is with tire upgrades on many cars, for example if I get super softs on the F50, they get installed on the front but the rear ends up with random tires that were never purchased, even changing to the super softs don't work at all, it reverts back after the race. (pictured in the spoiler below)

All the changes I've done were to the event prize cars. Extracted the a-spec GT2.VOL with GTVolToolGui, used GT2DataSplitter to decompile the files I wanted to change, recompiled it back with the same tools, and used IsoFileReplace to put the GT2.VOL back in the game image.
Am I doing this wrong?

Spoiler

 

[submaniac93]

Check that whatever program you used to edit the event files didn't create unneeded files like backups. You may have overflowed some of the memory by accidentally inflating the file count

 

[HWNathanJens]

I been experimenting with modding on top of a-spec on the last couple of days and I hit a roadblock where after I recompile my changes the game starts acting weird, the demo replays have cars not moving or fully acting erratic, some rally ghosts are broken and the most notable issue is with tire upgrades on many cars, for example if I get super softs on the F50, they get installed on the front but the rear ends up with random tires that were never purchased, even changing to the super softs don't work at all, it reverts back after the race. (pictured in the spoiler below)

All the changes I've done were to the event prize cars. Extracted the a-spec GT2.VOL with GTVolToolGui, used GT2DataSplitter to decompile the files I wanted to change, recompiled it back with the same tools, and used IsoFileReplace to put the GT2.VOL back in the game image.
Am I doing this wrong?

Spoiler

View attachment 1496956

Im assuming you have edited atleast 1 car's tyre files, this happens when a tyre file that exists in the front tyres folder isnt present in the rear tyres folder, or vice versa. Check any tyre folders you may have changed and if not check different cars around the f50 to see where exactly in the files it goes wrong (it would go in alphabetical order for the car's id, so for example this error would be in or above if50n)

 

[PhantomDrift]

Hey all, I just stumbled on this site after falling in love with this game (played tons of GT1 and 3 back in the day but mostly missed this one).

Well instead of mods, I was reading memory for the game to display interesting stuff during endurance races.

I had a lot of fun with this reader and figuring out the save file, but I'm guessing most of that is super old information here.

Can anyone point me in the right direction if I want to read more interesting info out of the game memory? I'm guessing some people have found what I have before and might have more interesting stuff to look at.

I was a little bummed to see the game doesn't track what performance parts are on the AI cars, just a power modifier. But I did find tire wear on them which was really what I wanted, and this program keeps track of when they pit. Also found it curious they null out the gear ratios but they still 'simulate' rpm and gearing somehow.

Anyway just curious if there is more knowledge out there as this is keeping my interest in the game as I grind out the last remaining endurance races and finally cross this game off my list 25+ years later.

 

[Bmuk]

So I'm very new here and have spent the last 3 or so weeks going from zero Blender/mod making experience to having 3 cars implemented in game (2 of them pictured here). There are a few areas I could use some help with, but the two big ones are:
1 - Texture flags. I know what they are and do, but have absolutely no idea how to change or add them. The Lancia Thema needs working brakelights but since I was still learning while making it, I didn't use pallete 14 & 15 like an idiot. Can i force the brakelight flags to work or do i need to redo my CLUTs? Do I also need to make a new blank face for pallete 15 or can i just assign it to the lit section of the lights?
2 - Headlights on night textures. How on earth do I make them look any good? I always end up with night lights that just look yellow-tinted

Sorry if this is the wrong place for this and thanks in advance! GT2 was my first ever game and ever since seeing the Vauxhall Sintra videos for beige edition and learning that this is possible I've wanted to do this. This is a literal childhood dream for me.

 

[pez2k]

Texture flags. I know what they are and do, but have absolutely no idea how to change or add them. The Lancia Thema needs working brakelights but since I was still learning while making it, I didn't use pallete 14 & 15 like an idiot. Can i force the brakelight flags to work or do i need to redo my CLUTs? Do I also need to make a new blank face for pallete 15 or can i just assign it to the lit section of the lights?

I don't think the exact palette numbers matter, but they need to be adjacent to each other. Basically, any face marked as a brake light switches from its original palette to the next palette when the brakes are applied. That palette can be a recoloured version of an existing bit of the texture, or some of Polyphony's models have an extra face overlaid on the lights which is transparent on the original palette and a red glow on the lit palette.

The way I wrote the model tool, all of the extra face data is handled via the materials in the OBJ file. To mark a particular face as a brake light, all you need to do is create a material, apply it to that face, then when mapping that material in the JSON file set IsBrakeLight to true. That means that any face which uses that material gets that flag set when creating a CDO model from the OBJ.

The readme for the tool has a full list of the available settings for each material, but if you get stuck just ask, or have a look at one of Polyphony's models to see how they set it up.

 

[Bmuk]

I don't think the exact palette numbers matter, but they need to be adjacent to each other. Basically, any face marked as a brake light switches from its original palette to the next palette when the brakes are applied. That palette can be a recoloured version of an existing bit of the texture, or some of Polyphony's models have an extra face overlaid on the lights which is transparent on the original palette and a red glow on the lit palette.

The way I wrote the model tool, all of the extra face data is handled via the materials in the OBJ file. To mark a particular face as a brake light, all you need to do is create a material, apply it to that face, then when mapping that material in the JSON file set IsBrakeLight to true. That means that any face which uses that material gets that flag set when creating a CDO model from the OBJ.

The readme for the tool has a full list of the available settings for each material, but if you get stuck just ask, or have a look at one of Polyphony's models to see how they set it up.

So essentially the actual light fixture needs to have a normal 0 or 8 flag on one pallete, with the adjacent pallete having a flag of 4 or 12 for just the lit section?

That's a lot simpler than i thought it'd be. Thanks! I haven't actually text-edited a json file for a model yet, just assigned properties from the PD car i replace in Blender. I'll have to get familiar.

 

[pez2k]

So essentially the actual light fixture needs to have a normal 0 or 8 flag on one pallete, with the adjacent pallete having a flag of 4 or 12 for just the lit section?

If you mean the material names, they're meaningless - that stuff is just in there for models converted from CDO to OBJ because I needed to ensure that the material names were unique. If you're creating models from scratch, name the materials whatever makes sense to you, as all of the actual setup is done in the JSON file that you give to the tool to create a CDO file from.

 

[Bmuk]

Thanks for the help! That's 3 and a half functioning cars now and currently making my fifth.

 

[Bmuk]

Thought I'd be brave and show something I'm currently porting in. It's a fictional but somewhat grounded street legal version of the Lancia LC2, with the premise being "what if group C had to follow homologation rules?". I started with the project A Spec LC2 and hoped to edit the model into something "road car-ish", but eventually ended up making about 80% of the model fresh.

I tried to think about how a cash-strapped Lancia would make a homologation supercar in 1982, so many of the parts (headlights, mirrors, door handles etc) are supposed to be from other Fiat Group vehicles of the time, and things like vents are just slots cut into the car. I also thought a fake grill in period Lancia style would add some brand character. I've named it the LC2-VF (Versione Stradale). Hope y'all like it, was terrified to share it here amongst so many more experienced modders.

 

[Bmuk]

Okay new question (sorry for being a pain) regarding menu making. For some reason my Buy Car button (in all dealerships) just takes me back to home screen without buying the car or even bringing the yes or no screen up, and my sell car button in the garage crashes the game completely.

All I did before this started happening is edit the Lotus dealership to move some cars around - I'd done the same to the Lancia dealer previously and it was fine then - and I haven't edited any screens with a buy car button, or the garage screen so I have no idea what's caused this. The button properties seem to be fine and I -think- they adhere to all the rules set out in the menu maker readme (not that I've touched them at all). I've been trying for hours to work out what I could have done to make this happen and then tried making fresh prepurchasecar and sellcar boxes with no change in outcome. Any ideas?

 

[pez2k]

Okay new question (sorry for being a pain) regarding menu making. For some reason my Buy Car button (in all dealerships) just takes me back to home screen without buying the car or even bringing the yes or no screen up, and my sell car button in the garage crashes the game completely.

Which menu pages are used for which popup message screens (e.g. confirming buying something) are defined in solodata.dat for each language, as are the car description pages, because they don't have the same page IDs for every language. Maybe you're using the wrong files in the wrong language folder, or have deleted existing menu pages or something?

 

[Bmuk]

Which menu pages are used for which popup message screens (e.g. confirming buying something) are defined in solodata.dat for each language, as are the car description pages, because they don't have the same page IDs for every language. Maybe you're using the wrong files in the wrong language folder, or have deleted existing menu pages or something?

The pop up menus are still there and I can access them with the tool (805.gm and 806.gm for the buy popups and 808.gm for the sell popup in the usa language files). I've double checked and both commonpic and gtmenu files are going to the correct place. The tool is also set to the usa 1.2 version so all that should be correct. It's like the purchase car and sell car functions have somehow got wrongly assigned or something. I also tried having the screen link on 0 to see if it just obeys the prepurchase flag anyway but that (probably predictably) also took me to the home screen for buy and crashed for sell. It's probably me being incredibly dumb somewhere but I genuinely can't work it out.

Would having one universal car showroom with no purchase flag and just normal screen links to 805.gm then 806.gm be a workaround? I assume it wouldn't work without the purchase flag but at this point i'm willing to try anything.

minor edit: Discovered that the yesbuybutton seems to do its job properly so i can use that to buy cars, just not the proper way. It really does just seem to be prepurchasecar and sellcar. if anything i'm more confused now.

 

[pez2k]

I think what I would do is revert all of the menu pages back to the original files, then reapply your changes one by one until you find which one is causing the problem. I can't think of any way you could break things that aren't really controlled by the menu screens without inadvertently having broken something else to cause it, so re-adding your changes step by step is a good way to find it.

 

[Bmuk]

I think what I would do is revert all of the menu pages back to the original files, then reapply your changes one by one until you find which one is causing the problem. I can't think of any way you could break things that aren't really controlled by the menu screens without inadvertently having broken something else to cause it, so re-adding your changes step by step is a good way to find it.

You may be right. I'll get on that with a backup.

I did also discover another content flag that don't seem to work properly. Buying weight reduction sends me to car description. I'm wondering if its what you said earlier and somehow the versions have got muddled or corrupted. Is there anyway to like "check" the solodata to be a million percent sure?

 

[pez2k]

Is there anyway to like "check" the solodata to be a million percent sure?

I wrote a solodata tool a while back which converts the data to and from a readable text representation.

 

[Bmuk]

I wrote a solodata tool a while back which converts the data to and from a readable text representation.

Okay, got it. How do I tell which Menu and ID values relate to which popups/gms?

Minor update: I - kinda - fixed it. As it turns out, disabling the prepurchase car function and just linking a normal box to 805.gm does actually work! The car purchase works with no gameplay difference at all. I still want to understand all this better and do it the proper way, and this "fix" doesn't work for the sell function for some reason, but at least this gives me a functional testbed while i rebuild my backup over time (modding is slow when it's a side hobby, second to a 45 hour work week in a cardboard box factory, hah).

I'm going to use my "broken menu build" to experiment with these things so something good comes of this. I'm going to try making a new sell menu from scratch to link to manually to see if that works. I'm also going to attempt to use a single purchase showroom that all new car boxes link to, since the only differences between them seem to be the brand name in the corner and the manufacturer IDs which seem to be irrelevant when using a global tune shop like in A Spec. I guess it'll make for a fun side quest at least.

Second update: Fixed the sell function and weight reduction too. It seems like all the prepurchase flags are broken, but the yesbuy ones work exactly as intended, so manually linking anything to its respective popup gm seems to work (although for some reason I had to make a new one for selling cars as the original was just crashing despite being seemingly identical)

 

[pez2k]

Okay, got it. How do I tell which Menu and ID values relate to which popups/gms?

The IDs are just the order of the pages in gtmenudat, in hex. I don't have a full map of which values are which menus, but if you compare to an unmodified gtmenudat they'll line up.

 

[Bmuk]

The IDs are just the order of the pages in gtmenudat, in hex. I don't have a full map of which values are which menus, but if you compare to an unmodified gtmenudat they'll line up.

Thanks for the help! Rebuilt my backup and this time I caught when it happened, although I still don't know -why- it happened. After extracting the gm for the dealership new car page and making the gtmenu.dat file, a load of the popup menu gm files kinda just... shuffled? Its hard to explain what i mean, sorry. But I made notes this time and got everything back to normal and it hasn't happened again since. Gonna chalk it down to weirdness and take what I've learned from it.

Thanks again, you're a lifesaver! Hopefully my next posts will be showing off creations, not begging for help.

 

[Bmuk]

Here's everything I've accomplished so far. A Collection of Lancias! (Ignore the colour names, accidentally mixed a couple up that have since been fixed)


037 Stradale - The road going version of the last RWD world rally champion. This is the early non evo model which usually gets neglected in favour of the crazier later ones.

Beta Montecarlo - A cool lightweight mid-engine sports car that inspired both the Beta Group 5 monster and the 037 project. Not as powerful as it looks but still very fun. Some might know it simply as the Montecarlo as the Beta name would be removed later on.

Delta S4 - Another road going version of a rally legend. With a full selection of upgrades this can actually dwarf the group B version. Like a lot. Might need to balance that.

Flaminia GT 2.8 - A grand tourer from the 60s and (in my opinion) one of the best looking Lancias of all time. Had a pretty unique V6 for its time and I'm surprised I've never seen one in a racing game.

LC2 VS - I did a big post on this not long ago. Road legal group C car.

Thema 8.32 - Enzo Ferrari's daily driver for the last years of his life. Ferrari V8 (hilariously less powerful than some of Lancia's own engines at the time), and the first active rear wing for a mass produced non-boutique car (modelled permanently up here).

Zeta 2.0 LX Turbo. It's... well, it exists. This was going to be a Kappa V6 Coupe, but I went and lost a bet and now we're all stuck with this. Arguably the most obscure of the Eurovans. That doesn't make it more interesting but I have let it have the stage 4 turbo upgrade

All fully implemented, although the Zeta has weird white lines around the wheels I'm still trying to understand

Next stop: Autobianchi, and not the A112 for once!

 

[The Real Emil]

Very cool to see, especially the Zeta the often forgotten 4th euro van! I think the only thing I will say is they look quite bright in comparison to the base game cars so I'd maybe try working on the shading. If you take apart a base car you can get how they did it and with chrome you'd be better going grayer so it doesn't pop so hard but this is a really great effort so far so keep at it!

 

[Bmuk]

Very cool to see, especially the Zeta the often forgotten 4th euro van! I think the only thing I will say is they look quite bright in comparison to the base game cars so I'd maybe try working on the shading. If you take apart a base car you can get how they did it and with chrome you'd be better going grayer so it doesn't pop so hard but this is a really great effort so far so keep at it!

Thank you! Yeah I'm learning as I go, and there isn't much in the way of tutorials out there for this. I'm not the most gifted in terms of art, so I've had to learn shading basics as a general thing too. I originally had darker chrome on the Thema and then realised it looked almost the same as the rubber trim so I thought it was too dark and overcompensated. The other shading-related issue i've had is the constant fear of using too many colours (the Thema - my first - has like 4 shades for the primary colour, whereas the Zeta - my latest - has about 9, but I don't think they're extreme enough). I think lowering the light value in psp7 by like 20 across the board might help reduce the overall pop, but I'm finding getting the actual shading lines right is a struggle. Do you think I should use more extreme jumps when going a step darker? like maybe having the difference between the top of the car and the skirts be greater, for example.

 

[Bmuk]

An early WIP screenshot of something I'm working on. The Autobianchi Stellina! Autobianchi would go on to be known for classics like the A112 and the... uh, that's about it actually. This bizarre little thing (trust me, it's way uglier from the back) comes with a blistering rear-mounted Fiat motor producing an astounding 32 horsepower. They made about 500 in 1964, and apparently it's the first Italian car with a fibreglass body (this seems to be the only thing anyone has to say about it online).

Turns out this shading stuff is pretty tough, especially on these older, curvier 60's cars. Definitely improving though! I aspire to eventually have a collection of versatile cars filling a variety of roles, and since all the slow 90s cars are likely to be covered by the Beige Edition guys (genuinely felt bad making the Lancia Zeta, since that feels like something they might do and I don't want to bug anyone), I figured I'd take this opportunity to expand GT2 to new eras too. Hope y'all like and can't wait to be good enough to start letting people test my cars!

 

[The Real Emil]

...since all the slow 90s cars are likely to be covered by the Beige Edition guys (genuinely felt bad making the Lancia Zeta, since that feels like something they might do and I don't want to bug anyone)...

Don't worry about what we are doing, just make what you want to make! It was pretty cool seeing the Zeta!

 

[yGodzila]

Here's everything I've accomplished so far. A Collection of Lancias! (Ignore the colour names, accidentally mixed a couple up that have since been fixed)


037 Stradale - The road going version of the last RWD world rally champion. This is the early non evo model which usually gets neglected in favour of the crazier later ones.

Beta Montecarlo - A cool lightweight mid-engine sports car that inspired both the Beta Group 5 monster and the 037 project. Not as powerful as it looks but still very fun. Some might know it simply as the Montecarlo as the Beta name would be removed later on.

Delta S4 - Another road going version of a rally legend. With a full selection of upgrades this can actually dwarf the group B version. Like a lot. Might need to balance that.

Flaminia GT 2.8 - A grand tourer from the 60s and (in my opinion) one of the best looking Lancias of all time. Had a pretty unique V6 for its time and I'm surprised I've never seen one in a racing game.

LC2 VS - I did a big post on this not long ago. Road legal group C car.

Thema 8.32 - Enzo Ferrari's daily driver for the last years of his life. Ferrari V8 (hilariously less powerful than some of Lancia's own engines at the time), and the first active rear wing for a mass produced non-boutique car (modelled permanently up here).

Zeta 2.0 LX Turbo. It's... well, it exists. This was going to be a Kappa V6 Coupe, but I went and lost a bet and now we're all stuck with this. Arguably the most obscure of the Eurovans. That doesn't make it more interesting but I have let it have the stage 4 turbo upgrade

All fully implemented, although the Zeta has weird white lines around the wheels I'm still trying to understand

Next stop: Autobianchi, and not the A112 for once!

Wow, nice work!

 

[yGodzila]

 

[Bmuk]

Speaking of nice work, this is really cool! The GT community's obsession with weird obscure daily drivers will always be one of my favourite things in the motoring world. I need to get my upgrade-system overhaul done so I can show it off with some of my new cars but my god is re-doing upgrade params for all the base game cars absolutely tedious. 🤣