Toxic Ragers - Back from the dead more times than Jesus

a quick updateI've been fiddling with pretty much every aspect of Carmageddon 2 recently and have made a number of interesting finds. I'll cover some of these things in more detail in later posts but for now... BULLETPOINT LIST!

* You can use "lastlap" and "otherlaps" instead of "constant" and "distance" in funks, these work on cars too!
* !materialname makes a flat surface become water, !!materialname makes the game instantly auto-recover you.
* Set the SPARKY noncar keyword on heavy noncars to make them spark when they move. Nice on 36rollinrock1.txt and 06rollinrock2.txt
* Game freezing when opponents fall off your map? Lower your YON!

That should tide you over for now. Errol out!

peds, zombies and aliens. oh my!Sometimes you just want to take a break from running over pedestrians and run over some zombies instead. Or possibly some aliens. Thanks to Coffeycup from over at Mac Carpocalypse this has been possible for quite a while with his handy alien and zombie packs.

But, if you're lazy like me, you might want to swap between peds, zombies and aliens with no file moving shennanigans. If so then you should click here (9.15MB) (for Aliens) and here (14.4MB) (for Zombies). These packs will allow you to have peds, zombies and aliens all installed at the same time, with appropriately labelled powerups and interface, without messing around with files. Simply create two shortcuts as per the instructions in the zips and you're good to go.

Enjoy! Errol out.

need for speedo

[21st 23:05:27] <Errol> has anyone ever made an analog speedo for C2?

I asked in #carmageddon last night. The answer was no then but is yes now!. Click HERE! (14.9KB) to grab the analog speedo, preview pic below. Errol out!

Speedotastic

the indestructible eagleOr any car you want!

This one is a bit of a silly update but someone might think of a clever use for it. In order to make your car unwastable you need to edit your car.txt and car.wam files.

In the txt change your "damage clauses" block to look something like:

0					// Number of clauses for top impacts
0					// Number of clauses for bottom impacts
0					// Number of clauses for left impacts
0					// Number of clauses for right impacts
0					// Number of clauses for front impacts
0					// Number of clauses for rear impacts

And edit the snappability factor in your wam file like so:

0.000000				// Snappability factor

And now you're done! An unwastable car! Errol out

just say no to apoI've never been a big fan of the APO system in Carmageddon 2 and I think a lot of people would agree with me that it ruins the game over time.
Do you agree with me? You might want THIS! (13.1KB)

The No APO HUD Fix simply removes the APO indictors from the ingame HUD (unfortunately not from the menus though) and disables all APO related powerups. This is as close to no APO you can get without exe modification. Errol out!

infonugget: translucency in carmageddonCarmageddon supports translucent materials much like Carmageddon 2 does. If you want your WINDOW01.MAT material to be 50% translucent you would simply rename it to W\50OW01.MAT. But what's this?! That didn't work?

The Fix

Assuming you have pre-processed your map (if you haven't, you should) what you need to do is open your mapname.act file in a hex editor, the top should look something like

0000h: 00 00 00 12 00 00 00 08 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 02 : ................
0010h: 00 00 00 23 00 00 00 18 05 04 50 50 30 31 20 31 : ..........PP01 1
0020h: 36 20 31 36 20 31 2E                            : 6 16 1.

See that "PP01 " (50 50 30 31 20)? That needs to go. As we're removing 5 bytes from the header block we should also change the header length from "00 00 00 18" to "00 00 00 13"

0000h: 00 00 00 12 00 00 00 08 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 02 : ................
0010h: 00 00 00 23 00 00 00 13 05 04 31 36 20 31 36 20 : ..........16 16 
0020h: 31 2E                                           : 1.

Save. Test your map. Translucency!

The Explanation

Carmageddon 2 supports a couple of different preprocess methods (Standard and QuadTree) so the root ACT node name has this information in it (PP01 for standard, PP02 for quadtree). Carmageddon didn't have QuadTree so this chunk of information is unexpected and seems to derail the map processing. Simply removing it fixes everything!

Errol out

infonugget: cops in carmageddon* There is a 10 cop limit per race.
* You can only have one Suppressor
* The cops are hardcoded (changing opponents 2 and 3 in opponent.txt won't make any difference)
* To replace a cop name your car APC to replace the Squad Car or BIGAPC to replace the Suppressor
* When setting the spawn location in the map.txt file the first three values are the x, y and z location.
* The last three control whether it's a Squad Car or a Suppressor! The last cop entry with 9,9,9 as the final three digits will be a Suppressor

That is all, Errol out.

oh noes! pooter a'splode!After many years of faithful service my 8800GTX bit the dust on saturday morning. Bad video ram seems to be the problem. I'm now back up and running on an 8400GS. Hopefully none of this will impact any of my current projects, I'm only really making a newspost about it because I feel like moaning and bitching. That is all, Errol out.

wonky navbarAfter I fiddled with the navbar the other day things might look a bit weird up there. If you force a refresh things should be right as rain.

roadmap to crushvilleI don't think it needs saying that most of my projects are on hold while I work on the crush editor. But it seems I said it anyway? Yay!
Anyway, here's a brief list of tasks that need completing in the run up to CrushED (Crush EDitor? Working title).

1) Finish and release TRixx
2) Document various Carmageddon file formats (act, mat and dat)
3) Build and release Carmageddon model viewer
4) Document crush data
5) Build and release CrushED

As simple as that! Each point will also have a newspost or an article associated with it so I can cover more info there. For now I'll just leave you with some various debug/testing screenshots. Errol out!

it's just a little crush

Thanks to Toshiba-3 for the test car. More information when I'm not quite so tired. Errol out!

Also... FIRST!

double crikeyTwo weeks?! I'm getting worse!

I'll update this post later with a proper news post. No I won't. Errol out.