(11-30-2020, 04:14 PM)samsepi0l Wrote: Wow- I feel like I am being a pain by asking these questions, but I hope these benefit someone else someday that may have the same questions.
I am assuming that these are the files I will need when I run MRON. I have backups, I created a folder for this stuff in-case anything goes wrong.
Also - what is the best way to pack the DAT? I have doodat at home, which I find difficult to use.
*** EDIT- I am an idiot, I figured out how to use doodat very easily. I needed to run the configuration with admin privileges. ***
Looks like you figured out the dat packing, but if you need an alternative, you can try the old school Pack/Unpack tools that I believe only run in an emulator: So looking to get back into editing (icr2.net)
The file structure looks about right and you need to run MRON to process those .3do files, then pack everything into a dat file, and then put the .dat into a folder that has the "Nascar 2" version of the track.txt, .lp files etc. as though you were going to run it in Nascar 2, but I think the Sandbox provides a template for those files.
(11-30-2020, 05:28 PM)checkpoint10 Wrote: Looks like you figured out the dat packing, but if you need an alternative, you can try the old school Pack/Unpack tools that I believe only run in an emulator: [url=https://www.icr2.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=1301&pid=8957#pid8957]So looking to get back into editing (icr2.net)
There is also an open source tool I made for packing/unpacking that requires Python: [url=https://www.icr2.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=1286&pid=9012#pid9012].MIP files and developing a new tool (icr2.net)
The file structure looks about right and you need to run MRON to process those .3do files, then pack everything into a dat file, and then put the .dat into a folder that has the "Nascar 2" version of the track.txt, .lp files etc. as though you were going to run it in Nascar 2, but I think the Sandbox provides a template for those files.
I think you were replying to my post right when I was making an edit to it so I will paste the edit below:
I also downloaded the N2-> ICR2 converter you suggested. I'm having a problem. When I was browsing the inside of the downloaded ZIP it looks like there are a bunch of different converters. I obviously selected "N2->ICR2". It looks like there are several tracks that have ZAR files and since I don't have N2 I can only assume these come with N2. When the converter asked me what track I wanted to convert, I just moved to the folder which contained my tamiami. I told it where my ICR2 was located, and it seemed to convert it super quickly but I didn't do anything by establishing a "fake" N2 folder. I'm a little confused by this step. When I went into the game and selected the track, I get a "problem loading track" error.
I will have to figure out the N2 part of this when I get home, because I don't have the sandbox working here where I do most of my track editing (if you want to call it that...)
I don't know what the ZAR files are. As far as I am aware, the only thing you need is N2TOICR2.EXE which it looks like you did. Yes, it should take only a few seconds for the tool to work, and did it say "Conversion Completed" at the end? If so, that is highly encouraging - congratulations on getting this far despite the fact that you can't get it to run in ICR2.
Now "Problem loading track" can arise from many reasons, but often it is because you are simply missing a required file. What you want to do is to unpack the track that is now sitting in your ICR2 directory and check that it has all the required files. There is a page in the Tutorial (I think it's one of the earlier sections) that has a list of what files are required just to get the track to run in ICR2.
Upon closer look at your previous post, you may be missing a TAMIAMI.CAM and TAMIAMI.SCR for the camera files - if so, just grab a couple files from another track for now.
(11-30-2020, 05:52 PM)checkpoint10 Wrote: Upon closer look at your previous post, you may be missing a TAMIAMI.CAM and TAMIAMI.SCR for the camera files - if so, just grab a couple files from another track for now.
You were right!
It was just missing the CAM and SCR. I also noticed there is a PCX file I thought I should maybe have included. I went into the original detroit track, unpacked the detroit.dat and stole the SCR, CAM and PCX. I then re-dat'ed everything after renaming them to tamiami.
The track loaded and I drove (laughing my a$$ off) with the keyboard around the entire lap twice. Everything seems to look as I expected. There were no real surprises other than the ugly pink fence and lines that I had already expected. Things looked like I thought they would.
I am super happy to get this far. This made my night and gave me some motivation back.
(11-30-2020, 05:52 PM)checkpoint10 Wrote: Upon closer look at your previous post, you may be missing a TAMIAMI.CAM and TAMIAMI.SCR for the camera files - if so, just grab a couple files from another track for now.
You were right!
It was just missing the CAM and SCR. I also noticed there is a PCX file I thought I should maybe have included. I went into the original detroit track, unpacked the detroit.dat and stole the SCR, CAM and PCX. I then re-dat'ed everything after renaming them to tamiami.
The track loaded and I drove (laughing my a$$ off) with the keyboard around the entire lap twice. Everything seems to look as I expected. There were no real surprises other than the ugly pink fence and lines that I had already expected. Things looked like I thought they would.
I am super happy to get this far. This made my night and gave me some motivation back.
Congratulations! Very excited to see your progress. What next? Those pink fence and lines are probably the next easiest things to fix (and will drive you crazy if you have to look at them much longer). Just look for the color section near the top of tamiami.3d and change the colors using the palette in sunny.pcx as a guide. Be aware, the colors will go back to default every time you re-run TRK23D, so you probably want to copy and paste your colors into a new text file to avoid losing your work if you ever have to make changes to your SG.
12-01-2020, 05:27 PM (This post was last modified: 12-01-2020, 05:34 PM by samsepi0l.)
(12-01-2020, 04:55 PM)checkpoint10 Wrote: Congratulations! Very excited to see your progress. What next? Those pink fence and lines are probably the next easiest things to fix (and will drive you crazy if you have to look at them much longer). Just look for the color section near the top of tamiami.3d and change the colors using the palette in sunny.pcx as a guide. Be aware, the colors will go back to default every time you re-run TRK23D, so you probably want to copy and paste your colors into a new text file to avoid losing your work if you ever have to make changes to your SG.
I learned something by accident too. If you take the track.txt and pack it inside of the DAT file it will load the version inside of the DAT, instead of the one that's just sitting inside of the track's directory.
How I learned this? I made a change to the track.txt (which was outside of the DAT) and when I loaded up the game it still had the old name. No matter what I did I saw that the track name would not change- that's because I hadn't changed the file that was INSIDE of the DAT.
I don't see how this is useful in a sense for editing but my guess is that once the game unpacks the DAT file it just dumps everything into memory so it does not matter if the files are inside or outside of the DAT.
As for my next steps I figured I'd mess with making the dotted lines around the track, those are TSDs right? Going to read the tutorial more...
12-01-2020, 07:01 PM (This post was last modified: 12-01-2020, 07:52 PM by samsepi0l.)
(03-30-2020, 02:15 PM)checkpoint10 Wrote: - Drawing the TSDs within OPE was hard to be exact, maybe due to the sensitive fake joystick controls I am using. But I ended up manually coding the pit lane lines in the .TSD file and then importing it into OPE. This actually might be the best way to draw pit lines, because the coordinates are largely the same coordinates you figure out for the track.txt file.
- I also realized that saving TSDs in OPE is a non-reversible process (unless you generate the .3D file again). In other words, once you save a .3D file in OPE with all your TSDs, you can't go back and unpaint them. Actually, I don't even think you can unpaint TSDs within the same OPE session. I tried to remove the TSD section of the .3D file by hand, but you also have to empty out the visibility lists which is tedious. I also apparently didn't do this right, because 3D23DO now gives me an warning when I compile (although it doesn't impact ultimately being able to convert to ICR2). I will probably do another fresh TRK23D at some point, which will require me to manually bring over TSOs from a back-up, as per Dennis's suggestion.
I tried messing with TSD's to make the little "bike path" on the edge of the pavement on the tamiami track. I sorta see how to do this, but boy you are sure right- it feels clumsy with the keyboard. I just used the keyboard- I need to learn the more accurate way of doing this that you describe. The "manual coding" method.
Here is an example of what I did:
Even know I was just screwing around, I saved the TSD file, and opened it in a text editor:
I see that the first number must be the color I picked, the second is some form of the width of the line. I am still trying to figure out what the other numbers mean.
12-01-2020, 11:01 PM (This post was last modified: 12-01-2020, 11:05 PM by CowtownBob.)
(12-01-2020, 05:27 PM)samsepi0l Wrote: I don't see how this is useful in a sense for editing but my guess is that once the game unpacks the DAT file it just dumps everything into memory so it does not matter if the files are inside or outside of the DAT.
The game doesn't "unpack" the DAT files as such, it just reads what's in them. And as you see, it defaults to using the DAT file if one is present, so don't bother packing your files until you're finished. Also beware that there is an upper limit to the number of files you can pack into a DAT, but I don't recall what the number is (there's at least one track out there with too many files to pack).
(03-30-2020, 02:15 PM)checkpoint10 Wrote: - Drawing the TSDs within OPE was hard to be exact, maybe due to the sensitive fake joystick controls I am using. But I ended up manually coding the pit lane lines in the .TSD file and then importing it into OPE. This actually might be the best way to draw pit lines, because the coordinates are largely the same coordinates you figure out for the track.txt file.
- I also realized that saving TSDs in OPE is a non-reversible process (unless you generate the .3D file again). In other words, once you save a .3D file in OPE with all your TSDs, you can't go back and unpaint them. Actually, I don't even think you can unpaint TSDs within the same OPE session. I tried to remove the TSD section of the .3D file by hand, but you also have to empty out the visibility lists which is tedious. I also apparently didn't do this right, because 3D23DO now gives me an warning when I compile (although it doesn't impact ultimately being able to convert to ICR2). I will probably do another fresh TRK23D at some point, which will require me to manually bring over TSOs from a back-up, as per Dennis's suggestion.
I tried messing with TSD's to make the little "bike path" on the edge of the pavement on the tamiami track. I sorta see how to do this, but boy you are sure right- it feels clumsy with the keyboard. I just used the keyboard- I need to learn the more accurate way of doing this that you describe. The "manual coding" method.
Even know I was just screwing around, I saved the TSD file, and opened it in a text editor:
I see that the first number must be the color I picked, the second is some form of the width of the line. I am still trying to figure out what the other numbers mean.
