Mac Carpocalypse: Carmageddon 1 Tutorials: Track Editing
Note: these tutorials demonstrate some basic editing techniques in Carmageddon. Most of the files on the download page demonstrate these techniques also. Download a file or two and you'll see how things work. For basic editing purposes, we recommend using Adobe Photoshop, a text editor, and you're going to need Carmagedit.
Welcome to the hardest part of editing in Carmageddon. Although the track textures can be difficult to edit because of the lack of relative control over where the textures may go, editing the actual track charateristics can be more challenging perhaps because of what's involved. In this section, we'll teach you how to add more pedestrians, more (or less) police cars, how to make a city into an snowbound nightmare, and how to make various levels of darknes or fog. The track TXT files also control how much time you begin with at each level of difficulty, how much time you get added for crossing checkpoints, and how many credits you get in bonus for either smashing up your opponents or running over all the pedestrians.

Let's get started.

Open the RACES.TXT file to find the name of the track you want to modify. Look for the race name, then below it you'll see the TXTfile associated with it. For example, "Downtown Devestation" uses the CITYC1.TXT file.

in track editing, it's mandatory to have a saved game with a #1 ranking because to modifiy some things you'll need the various coordinates that you can only get by actually driving through the track. Simply choose the track you want to change and while racing, press the "I" key to cause a set of numbers to appear on the screen. The one's you're interested in will be in brackets and will look something like (-2.444,-11.555,3.777).

Open up the associated TXT file in your favorite text editor and look through it. In order, you'll see the intial starting times, completion bonuses, locations of checkpoints and timer increments for crossing each, the names of the various graphics and models used in the race, "funk and groove" which allows the various animations such as the hotel sign and multiplex billboards, the very long pedestrian section, opponent paths, cop starting points, and driving surface modifiers which control how much the vehicle skids on certain surfaces such as grass, dirt, etc.

Since many of the things you can edit should be self-explanatory, we'll cover the more interesting hacks. For example, we all want more pedestrians to run over. This topic is covered on a separate page for your convenience. A similar hack to adding pedestrians is changing the number of police cars. Once again, as is the case with pedestrians, you'll need to first race in the track and jot down some coordinates. But this time, instead of making a starting and ending point, you'll simply need a starting point. Find the location you wish to put a cop at, press "I" while racing (at a stop is better, or just make a screen snap) and jot down the numbers in the parentheses. Go to the track TXT file, scroll down past the opponent path section until you see the "cop starting point" section. It will look similar to below:

CITYC1.TXT// ****** COP STARTING POINTS ******
<10 // Number of cop start points
 
<34.928, -1.820, -175.203, 0.000, 0.000, 0.000 //Cop point #1
<33.770, -1.820, -185.696, 0.000, 0.000, 0.000 //Cop point #2
<26.841, -1.820, -182.410, 0.000, 0.000, 0.000 //Cop point #3
<21.812, -1.821, -182.341, 0.000, 0.000, 0.000 //Cop point #4
<18.376, -1.822, -182.261, 0.000, 0.000, 0.000 //Cop point #5
<8.544, -1.820, -181.744, 0.000, 0.000, 0.000 //Cop point #6
<3.783, -1.819, -181.109, 0.000, 0.000, 0.000 //Cop point #7
<-1.318, -1.822, -180.325, 0.000, 0.000, 0.000 //Cop point #8
<-3.585, -1.820, -171.732, 0.000, 0.000, 0.000 //Cop point #9
<6.437, -1.820, -171.462, 0.000, 0.000, 0.000 //Cop point #10

We've found that the total number of cops cannot exceed 10, so if you try more, it's likely the game will crash. At any rate, simply change the number of cops to reflect the number you want, and add/delete the necessary lines to the section above. The set of numbers in parentheses must follow the format above in that they go in the first three columns, then they are followed by "0.000 ,0.000, 0.000" For some real fun, try stopping on the top of a building, jotting down some coordinates, and modifying the cop section accordingly. It's smashing fun to have cops drop in on you from above. A hack we recently worked on was transforming a regular city track into a snowy nightmare. This was accomplished by first changing the appropriate PIX file and replacing some graphics with snow graphics, then modifying the actual TXT file to go along with it. First thing we did was to make the track more slippery. Near the end of the TXT file is a section which controls just this. It looks something like this:

CITYC1.TXT// ****** MATERIAL MODIFIERS ******
<3 // number of material modifiers
 
<1.0 // car wall friction
<1.0 // tyre road friction
<1.0 // down force
<0.0 // bumpiness
<0 // tyre sound index
<0 // crash sound index
<0 // scrape noise index
<1.0 // sparkiness
<1 // room for expansion
 
<2.0 // car wall friction
<0.7 // tyre road friction
<1.0 // down force
<5.0 // bumpiness
<-1 // tyre sound index
<-1 // crash sound index
<-1 // scrape noise index
<0.0 // sparkiness
<3 // room for expansion

Simply change the numbers for each "friction" section to affect the vehicle's traction. In the snow city example, we lowered all the friction variables by about .1 to simulate a slightly treacherous drive. Lowering the friction variables even further resulted in something like a bad snowstorm. And lowering even further essentially made driving near impossible. But changing the graphics and traction wouldn't have been enough. To give the appearance of a snow storm, we changed the fogginess.

CITYC1.TXT// ****** HORIZON STUFF ******
 
<5 // Horizontal repetitions of sky texture
<24 // Vertical size of sky texture (degrees)
<83 // Position of horizon (pixels below top)
<8,0 // Degree of fog/darkness


The horizon section can be found near the top of the TXT file. You'll no doubt notice that some tracks are dark, some are foggy, and some appear "clear." Well, this is where it takes place. By thumbing through other TXT files for other tracks and looking at this same section, you'll find the names of the various horizon PIX. For example, our unmodified TXT file here once said "NYHORIZN.PIX" which is the distant city image seen in some tracks. Since our objective here was to simulate a snowstorm, we changed it to say "none." The next goal was to make the appearance of snow. So, looking further down at the example above, you'l see "depth cue mode" which can be changed to read "dark, fog, or none." And below that you can control the intensity of either fog or darkness, on a scale from 0-10 with 0 being no effect and 10 being heavy. So, in short, to make a city track into a snowy one, we had to change the graphics, the traction characteristics, and make the appearance of a snow storm. In fact, our modification includes several TXT files that increase the slipperiness as well as the thickness of the "snow" for the appearance of going from a light snow to blizzard conditions. All this once again achieved by simply a few modifications.

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