NASCAR Legends - Mid70s Carshape Help

[jxeboy]

Hi All,

I have been working on a little project to make NASCAR Legends feel a bit more appropriate for the mid-late 70s. This is heavily inspired by the awesome Carsets and Track updes created by Seb at retrosim:

https://retrosim.e-monsite.com/pages/nas...rsets.html

The carsets feature edited body styles which works pretty well for the 'Chrysler' body which is used for the monte-carlos and other larger makes, but I felt like the Torino body didn't suit the Chargers/Plymouths and Mid-70s torinos as well.

Using 3doEdit I have been able to 'shape' the Torino into something I feel much more resembles these cars:

Default (body included with 1975 set):


Edited:



This was a very painful process of moving each vertices one by one to reform the shape, but it has ended up looking much better than I could have hoped (that I could do)!  (Big thanks to Eddie500 for sharing the CarEdit utility so i could 'rake' the car a bit https://www.icr2.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=1551)


It is nearly complete but there are a couple of items which I cant figure out and was wondering if anyone here had knowledge on:

1. Is it possible to add new Polygons to a 3do?

The reason I ask this is because I want to add a fuel tank (a box basically) to the underside of the rear of the car. I had to pretty agressively move the rear end up on the car to make it match how they set up these cars in reality (high rake for ground-effects):



The issue with this is now when you are behind a car you can see under the car and basically where the rear axel is supposed to be:



I only know how to move existing polygons, and I did try to hide it by dragging down the interior in the car, but as you can see the tires are always drawn infront of it, so its not effectively 'hiding' them (more on this with my second point I think):




2. The Drawing of Textures is delayed

No doubt this is because different polygons are showing from angles they were not intended to show, but I now have some 'grey' polygons when looking at the car from certain angles. It is not terrible, but Im not sure if there is a way to correct this type of thing.

Here is an example, if you look at the roofs of the cars you can see some of the polygons are grey:





Those are really the two main issues I am having and hope to fix before "releasing" this. I also need to do something about a damage model, but I will look at that later.

I have attached the cars.dat to this thread if anyone wants to look at it. These specific bodies are the "ta_norm" and "tn_norm" .3do (they are the same for this carshape).

Beta Carshape: https://www.mediafire.com/file/0h95oz7ej...a.zip/file

Thank you for any knowledge!

[Pavel 69]

I don't know how pontiacfan did his NS carshapes back in the days. 3do2def tool only supports ICR2 and N2 3do formats. So to do anything to N3 3do (changes to flavors, not vertices) requires hexediting I think.
But... I was thinking about thisf for a long time. Maybe Checkpoint10 can try to update his 3do to 3d script and make it support N2 and N3 3do formats?  That will makes things much easier.

[checkpoint10]

I am not familiar with the 3do format for N2/N3 since I'm usually just going from .3d to .3do using the Papy tool. But if there is really no tool out there and we think this would open up many possibilities for modding those games, I can look into making a similar tool.

[samsepi0l]

I'll say this- I used the 3do to 3d tool to take the default icr2 "castle.3do" building from factory long beach to use in my lbeach91 and 96 projects. It worked, but the output was totally different than what I was used to seeing. When I code a 3d file I need to use a very specific way of doing it so I can come back to it later and figure out what I was originally doing. I make a diagram out of ascii to "see" what I am trying to do. Then I define the points and use all kinds of comments. Plus another thing to is I like to define my point names and polygon names in ways that make sense for me to be able to easily imagine what is where. Sure - this takes me longer but it makes it easier for me to understand what I did when I eventually forget (which I always do). Good think I make so many 3do's that it almost comes natural now!

I will say that Pavel's original word document for making the 3do was very helpful in learning, but I have since kind of developed my own way of making a bsp tree. The main thing I do different is imagining which surfaces get priority over eachother when it comes to the need to put things places in the tree.

[Pavel 69]

Problem is that all this tools that resize, move or scale 3dos only modify vertices points and don't touch planes definitions in BSP tree. As result after modifications 3do file usually has all sort of visual glitches. To solve this errors planes definitions have to be recalculated. For ICR2/N2 3do there is decompiler-compiler tool. It let you have 3do file in text format, enter new values and compile back 3do pretty easely. So planes can be fixed there manually, it's slow process. And it's better make changes to 3do step by step with fixing modified planes along the way.

With N3 things are bit complicated. There is only decompiler tool for N3 3do file, but I never saw compiler for it made available. But it's possible to use I2/N2 decompiler-compiler with some restrictions. First of all N3 3do had MRON (Normals) section for calculation specular highlights. N2 decompiler doesn't recognize this sections and returns error. It's possible with HexEditor to remove this section from 3do file and the run decompiler. For most of simple objects it's ok. But compre to N2 3do format N3 3do format uses number of new Flavors entries.This new Flavors are for animation (caution lights, flaggers) and for textured polygons with alpha channel (track groove, car windows). So when N2 decompiler finds such unknown Flavor string then it replaces it with something else or returns error.

So situation with N3 is such that we can decompile 3do in one txt format (with N3 decompiler) but we have 3do compiler only from 3d txt file to 3do. That's why I think it will be better to have N3 3do to 3d text converter or N3 decompiled text files to 3d txt converter.

[checkpoint10]

Do you have the N3 decompiler tool? Also I found some documentation of the N2 format, do you know of documentation for N3?

https://www.simcyberworld.com/text/bbb/n23do.txt

[Pavel 69]

It's part of Def3 tool. I'm not shur if you can run installer for it on modern system so here I packed whole folder of installed tool.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1...drive_link
This tool also comes with help (*.hlp) files that have information about file formats. But unfortunately modern systems doesn't open this files anymore. But I will try to copy information from it and will post it here later.

[samsepi0l]

Wow- after reading this I feel dumb again.... (and I thought I understood how things work!)

[Pavel 69]

Here it is copy of information about N3 3do file format.

To get idea what Flavor number each BSP function is I have this help:

FLAVOR I2/N3 - BSP function


1 /2  - POLY
2 /2  - POLY [T]
3 /3  - PMAP/SRB
- /4  - group of two 5 MATERIAL's for empty/full grandstand
4 /5  - MATERIAL
5 /6  - FACE ( , , ), ;
6 /7  - FACE2 ( , , ), , ;
7 /9  - BSPF ( , , ), , , ;
8 /10 - BSPA ( , , ), , , ;
9?/8  - BSP2 ( , , ), , , , ;
10/11 - BSPN ( , , ), , ;
11/4  - LIST
11/17 - DISTANCE SWITCH
12/15 - DYNO { , , , , }
12?/16 - DATA { , , , , }
-  /17 - SWITCH STATE (" ") { }
15/14->13 - DYNAMIC (object)
  /14->19 - DYNAMIC (object) Movement?? (only N3)
  (14 is object name, it's called by Flavor 13/19)