Painting the town is the hardest graphics challenge in Carmageddon you'll face for several reasons. One, the model for each track is obviously larger than that of a car. Second, some tracks have nearly a hundred textures. And sometimes a texture can appear in the strangest places, even turned sideways and stretched or turned upside down. If this wasn't enough, you really have no way of knowing where a certain texture will appear without some experimentation and by driving around the track several times.

To begin changing a track, open the RACES.TXT file with your text editor and find the particular race you want to change. Our favorite is "Downtown Devestation" and a quick glance at the RACES.TXT file reveals that our track uses CITYC1.TXT as the text file for that race. All race TXT files can be found in the RACES folder. Open up your track's TXT file and scroll down to where you see the "pixelmap files to load" section. That's where you'll find the PIX file used in the track. For example, "Downtown Devestation" uses CITYC.PIX for its textures. Keep in mind that there are other races that use the same PIX file, so if you make changes in one PIX file, several races will ultimately be affected.

We suggest that once you find the right PIX file (found in the PIXELMAP folder) make a new folder and copy that PIX file there. Open it in Carmagedit and export all the frames (Mac users will have to do it one by one - naming them something to remind you of the order will help in importing them.....Windows users will export them all at once and with the name of the file automatically added).

When you open the images in your paint program, you'll find that 99% of them are 64x64 and the remaining are most likely 256x256 (such as the roads and billboards). It might help at this time to import one large one, then save either a palette file or CLUT from it for future reference. This will help you assign the right set of colors to your new creations. Also, if you choose to use images of bricks or buildings from an outside source, opening them then converting to 256 colors using your saved color palette or CLUT will assure compatibility with Carmageddon.

Make the changes you want to make, then from your paint program, re-save the edited frame as 256 color PICT, making sure to use your saved PAL or CLUT color table, and then import back into Carmagedit. Save the PIX file and quit. Drop the modified PIX file into the PIXELMAP folder after renaming the original, then start Carmageddon and take a look.

Most likely, things won't look quite right and intended textures won't appear in the right places, so make some screensnaps of the problem areas to help guide you where to correct problems. With some trial and error, you'll eventually get it. Changing the look of a city track, for example, might take a week or so of trial and error since you don't have any control over where the textures appear.

Downloading a track replacement that others have made can be a help also. Take a look at our Track Hack area for some examples of track replacements.