06-02-2006, 01:33 PM
Joe has written a howto for converting Racer tracks (such as the ones found on racer-xtreme.com) and checked it into the vdrift-trackeditor SVN repository. Here it is in its current form. Note that these instructions (and the tools too) assume that you're running Linux.
To do all these things you'll need all the stuff in the trackeditor repository. Most of these tools are still a bit rough around the edges, but they're usable.
- Unzip and put racer files in temporary folder RACER_TP (temporary track path). Make sure the path has no spaces (dof2joe doesn't like spaces).
- Create new folder for track in track editor folder TRACKEDITOR_TP.
- Convert all texture names to lowercase in TRACKEDITOR_TP via Code:
find . -type f -name \*.tga|sort -r|awk '{f=tolower($1);
if(f!=$1 && p[f]!=1){print "mv "$1" "f}p[$1]=1}' | /bin/sh - Make folder TRACKEDITOR_TP/objects/
- Run the following command: If there are thousands of .dof files, you may have to do this in steps to avoid a "too many arguments" error from your shell. This will take a while. Textures are automatically converted using nconvert. No filenames should have spaces.Code:
dof2joe/dof2joe -p TRACKEDITOR_TP/objects/ RACER_TP/*.dof
- Open track editor /data/tracks/editor.config and set active track to TRACKEDITOR_TP.
- Run the track editor. Trace the roadways and mark the starting position (press H for help).
- CD to the TRACKEDITOR_TP/objects folder (this is important, the packfile stores relative paths) and run Code:
joepack/joepack -c objects.jpk *.joe
- Copy TRACKEDITOR_TP into the main VDrift tracks folder VDRIFT_TP. Erase VDRIFT_TP/objects/*.joe (since they are in the pack file).
- Add your VDRIFT_TP to VDrift/data/tracks/track_list.txt
- Add VDRIFT_TP/about.txt and ensure that the first line is the name of the track.
- Run VDrift and check out what the track looks like in-game. Note that you will only be able to drive on the roadways you defined in the track editor since no other surfaces have been flagged as collideable. Also take a screenshot for the track selection screen.
- Add the track selection screenshot to VDrift/gui/tracks/VDRIFT_TP.png (hopefully these png files will be moved into the folders of the individual tracks soon).
- Open up all of the texture files in TRACKEDITOR_TP/objects and review which textures belong to objects that should be collide-able (roads and walls), have full brightness (trees), be mipmapped (fences and fine transparent objects should not be mipmapped), or be skyboxes.
- Any textures that have transparent areas are usually colored #FF00FF in the Racer textures. You'll need to make these truly transparent in the PNG files. An easy way to do this is to use ImageMagick. Use the command This can be scripted to speed things up of course.Code:
mogrify -transparent rgb\(255,0,255\) file.png
- Set the correct object properties using the VDrift-tracked/listedit tool (more documentation to come).
- Done!
To do all these things you'll need all the stuff in the trackeditor repository. Most of these tools are still a bit rough around the edges, but they're usable.