by addie walti, july 30, 2001
oct 16, 2001 (new link to cmagic)
as you may know every (real) track has bumps, more or less. if you want to have bumps in your gp3-track, there are two ways to get them. you make very small track sectors with drastic height changes and/or you edit the bumps-table. this workshop covers the second way.
the bumps-table is a table of pairs of values for bumpy section
in a track. those pairs consist of a DFS-value and a value for the bumpiness. DFS
means “distance from start” and can be looked up e.g. in the TE of paul hoad in menu
“tables /track data” in the column “cumlative length” or in the “DFS”-column in the
track-sector-table in the TE of vaino iso-hannula.
this DFS-value sets the position on the track where the new bumpiness-value will
come into action. BE SURE the DFS-value is shorter than the length of the track !
DFS-values longer than the track will crash gp3 to windoze desktop when loading the
track.
in the original tracks you find values for the bumpiness in the range of some 0 to
3. higher values will give you bigger bumps, try 15 for having an idea. btw those
bumps are not visible in the game, but they are noticed by the telemetry (and actually
thats how marcel “babbel” borsboom discovered them some long time ago !).
in grandprix2 we had the bumps-table in the trackfile and it could be edited in the TE. in gp3 the bumps-tables for all (original-)tracks are hardcoded in gp3.exe (geoff only knows why). but thanks to rene SDI smit and marc aarts we are able to adjust this table anyway these days. we have to edit the so called “magic-data”.
the “magic-data” means all track-specific data that is found in the gp3.exe. for
dealing with the magic-data you need a tool called cMagic by marc aarts (see http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsdi/) and a texteditor like e.g. notepad.
with cMagic.exe you can get the “magic-files” from the original tracks. you can take
one of them, change it to your wishes and merge it into the trackfile afterwards,
again by the help of cMagic.exe. (so far this has to be done everytime after the
track is changed in a TE, as the latter do not preserve the magic-data; but this
may change in the future.).
more info on how to deal with the magic-data can be found in the file cMacic.txt
thats in the cMagic-package.
as soon as you run grandprix3 via gpXpatch by rene SDI smit (see http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsdi/)
the mentioned “magic data” will be patched into gp3 at runtime. in other words gpXpatch
recognizes the magic-data in the trackfile and copies it into the memory of gp3.exe.
if you run gp3 without gpXpatch the track is valid also (if everything is within
the regular limits of course).
i hope its useful