How to transform a CSM-mod into a NON-CSM-mod
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Mods come in 2 sorts: a mod can be installed in the CSM of the ZaZ tools and launched from there; CSM will then make substantial changes to your main GP4 directory and when you quit the game this directory is then completly restored. Such mods are the most common ones.
The other sort of mods, like the Season 2002, is a non-CSM mod that is launched with GPxPatch or with GP4.exe directly; these mods are however rarely available. Both mod systems have their advantages and backdrops. These are:
CSM mods:
Takes long to load and start but has a convenient menu for the setup choices. CSM mods have a better interface for editing the Magic Data (in TSM) and you can setup additional things for the car damage and its behavior (Damage.ini).
Non-CSM mods:
The biggest advantage is that they load very fast with GPxPatch and their single install requires much less Hard Disc space, whereas the CSM system must constantly have ALL tracks available which requires a lot of space. As another advantage, the entire features of TW4Tweaker are available, the Magig Data can also be easily edited and implemented with CMagic, the only backdrop is: the Damage.ini file of CSM does NOT work outside of CSM (but see my trick at the end in "What I have tested"
Some editors and utilities like the GUI version of GP4Tweaker and other older utilities that are very useful anyway for modders do not work with CSM (unless applying some tricks), but maybe you want to use them. My following method works to transform a CSM mod into a non-CSM mod that can be started simply with GP4.exe / GPxPatch.exe / GP4Tweaker.exe etc... and makes the mod workable again with other utilities.
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A. Preparation work
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Make a CLEAN and FULL install of GP4 and then add the most important required tools:
Note: Experts may skip these 10 steps and re-copy the decrypted GP4.exe into the main dir, but you are at your own risk if the game crashes afterwards...I have warned you!
1. Make a FULL install of the game. Do not install in \Program Files (x86), e.g. install in a folder C:\Games...
2. Install the Patch 9.6.
3. Replace GP4.exe with the Decrypted GP4.exe 1.02.
4. Install the latest GpxPatch.
5. Set both GPxPatch.exe and GP4.exe in Windows Compatibility Mode for XP SP2 and set 'Run as Admnin'.
6. Start GP4.exe with GPxPatch.
7. The game asks to calibrate grafics and sound. Accept. After the process go in the Options > Advanced Grafics.
8. Set resolution to the highest compatible with your system and set everything to Max value, don't change Bump.
9.
Run 'Test' and check if the FPS bar is at maximum (60 FPS) after the test, if no, then repeat Test. Once the the FPS bar is at max, then set it manually to 30 FPS. Click OK to apply the changes and quit grafic options. Quit GP4 by accepting 'save the changes'.
10.
Open the file f1graphics.cfg in the main GP4 folder and change the following settings:
1 ; f1graphics.cfg controls all settings (default 0) note:- make this 1
1920 ; [RELEASE] Game 3D Horizontal Resolution
1080 ; [RELEASE] Game 3D Vertical Resolution
You can now play the game with a resolution of 1920x1080 with best grafics at 30 FPS.
After these 10 steps you are ready to simply play the standard game by starting the GP4.exe with no extra mods or changes, or you start it within GPxPatch which will apply all changes and improvements.
A tip: If you do a lot of mod changes and traffic, and out of the blue GP4 starts to crash, then the good medecine is: re-copy the fresh decrytpted GP4.exe file in your dir before getting in hairy recovery attempts
B. Make a BACKUP of your main game folder
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Before you start playing create a GP4_BACKUP folder and copy the entire content of your main GP4 folder in it. If you want to convert new CSM mods afterwards you then have a fresh start to go with by simply ripping out all your main game folder and copying back the backup content. Also, if things go wrong you don't have to re-install the whole thing.
Note: Experts can skip this but they must know how to assign all possible utilities to the new directory and starting the game from there, this is possible. However: watch your Hard Disk space! GPxPatch will adapt immediately and follow the setup from the new directory without user intervention except maybe the Track section that must be adjusted. For other utilities, especially GP4Tweaker (use the /P command!) you will have to adapt.
C. Setting up your mod in CSM before transforming it into non-CSM
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Install the ZaZ tools if you have not done it already, launch CSM, it will ask you for fast wads. Accept. Then, go in the Options and point to your GP4.exe containing your (provisory) CSM mod. Deactivate the Update else a message will popup every time at start.
Now, very important, before installing any mod in CSM, install the
PLUS-trackpack. This pack is needed for Season 1988-199x mods and MUST be installed BEFORE installing any mods or their trackpacks. If you skip it or if you do it only later then CSM will get confused and not patch the mod correctly which will result in game CRASHES. So install the PLUS-Trackpack NOW, even for mods that don't need it, sure is sure...
After the installation You will then notice a new 'Track' folder in your main game dir. The PLUS-Trackpack has added 17 directories with the name of all default game tracks. Inside you will see 2001 tracks. Never touch these ones or CSM will not work correctly.
Now, install the CSM mod you want to transform, possible updates to the mod and its trackpack. Open the Track folder and look at the track structure. New directories have been added with the mod Season's year in the directory names. Navigate inside to take notice of the track wad files. A track always comes with a wad file, a dat file, a loadingscreen as bmp file, a gpi file for the track map and a settings.ini file. Not all these files must be present but the wad and dat will be there as a minimum.
Remember all the track structure, because later we need to adjust the Track section of GPxPatch to point correctly to all these wad and dat files! More about this later.
Create a directory GP4_BACKUP_GPSAVES outside of the game directory and copy the entire GPSAVES folder from your game directory into it. You do this because later after the transformation, if you are in doubt about things that are not enabled in your mod or things you want to enable later you can go through the Data folder of this backup and retrieve/transfer/copy what you need in order to activate it. At some point if you are satisfied with your mod you can delete all this.
Prepare your CSM mod to launch:
It is very important to setup your mod with CSM so that most settings will be activated. Be sure to load all tracks, the best grafics, enable visors, rain droplets and all sound (you can disable all that later). use a profile to do races with your own name (create one in the 'Other Stuff' section, then right-click on your mod and activate your profile).
For all mods it is probably best to chose these settings:
Chose Grand Prix: 1st track of the season
Select Driver: Make a profile and chose the right driver as in your profile driver number!
Select Race Type: Season Championship (this should load all cars an anims for the season, check this with the cars.wad and anims.wad later)
Other choices: Select best grafics, best sound, rain droplets, visors enabled, etc...
By doing all that you ensure that later all settings are available to be changed in GPxPatch or in the game, and no options are greyed-out.
Warning:If you chose Hi resolutions from the drop-down in CSM, then you MUST set the Advanced Grafics in-game to highest resolution (change to Manual), otherwise you'll get white cars, ghosts, artefacts, the pope on a skateboard, truncated helmets, grafic anomalies of all sort or game crashes...
D. Transforming your mod
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Just before starting the mod in CSM create a new directory for your non-CSM mod, e.g. call it GP4_MOD where 'MOD' is the year of your Season. Also be sure to have the main game folder (with GP4.exe) open together with your new GP4-MODfolder, it's because you have to QUICKLY go in these folders shortly
Start the mod with CSM normally by clicking Start. Should CSM tell you "...you need at least version xxxx to start this mod" then open the main [your mod].csm file and simply change the inside version to a lower one.
Immediately after starting the mod in CSM, it gets tricky and you need to
act quickly, so read the next step carefully before starting:
ALT-TAB to the Desktop and copy/paste
GP4Tweak.bin from the CSM mod folder into your GP4_MOD folder, then copy all the content of the CSM mod folder EXCEPT THE GPSAVES FOLDER into the GP4_MOD
Note: You have to be
QUICK While copy/pasting the gp4tweak.bin beause if waiting too long Windows will tell you that the file is in usage and cannot be copied. If it's that, then you have to redo starting the mod in CSM and trying to copy again. You NEED this file otherwise the game will crash or show grafic anomalies if starting without CSM. For all the remaining files you can take your time for copying
For the GP4Tweak.log file you can click 'Ignore' in the Windows message, but for any other files you will have to copy them manually afterwards. It is essential that the GP4.exe which has been modified by CSM by starting the game is correctly copied in your GP4_MOD folder. In my case, all this has worked.
After the copy process, quit the game and wait until CSM has restored your main game folder, then quit CSM.
Make a BACKUP of the fresh GP4.exe and name it Season_xxxx_GP4.exe, also backup the GP4tweak.bin, just in case you run in trouble with future changes, you never know...
Go in the GP4_MOD folder and create an empty GPSAVES folder. Don't forget this step because this folder is needed later for saving your games!
Experts can skip this next step if they intend to play the non-CSM mod from within the GP4_MOD folder and want to keep the main game folder intact, otherwise be sure to have executed point B above! (Backup main folder).
Go in the main game GP4 folder, delete all its content and then paste all the content of GP4_MOD into it. You can now delete the empty GP4_MOD folder.
E. Making a final check, checking in GPxPatch that all links are correct and adjust the Track section
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Basically, your new non-CSM mod is ready to go, but we must do some final checks and maybe move the track wad files to their right place.
The first thing to check visually is the presence of the cars.wad, anims.wad in the main directory, if the filesize has changed to a huge size (the original is about 20.000 kb only) it means CSM has correctly patched and transfered the new cars into the file. Then, still in the main dir you will notice all the the new track wads, usually labeled with the season's year. But if you see files like 'belgium.wad', 'germany.wad' etc, this are not necessarily track files but could also be wad for the cars that will load when you play specific tracks. It depends on the mod. When opening the gpxdata folder you can see all files added by CSM that are necessary to be read by GPxPatch.
Launch GPxPatch from your new non-CSM dir and first check that
'Enabled Debug mode' is activated and the verbosity set to at least Medium. It has been reported that some mods will crash the game if this is not set.
Then, go through all the sections to see if the pathes are correct. Skip the Track section for the moment. It is essential that all the pathes are right! Open any icon with a directory to check it. All must point to withing your new main non-CSM mod directory!
Checking and adjusting the Track section in GPxPatch:
In chapter C. I told you to navigate the Track folder to get familiar with its content. We now must check that GPxPatch points correctly to all the dat files for the tracks. If it's not correct, the game will crash when going to the 3D world.
If you have prepared the CSM mod as I adviced above, then you should be lucky because GPxPatch has all the tracks set correctly after the transformation, all the tracks are located in the main game dir, if you navigate in the Tracks folder and go in the season tracks you will notice that the wad files are gone. This is because CSM has patched them and moved them into the main folder. In this case check in GPxPatch if all the tracks point to the dat files located in the Track folder, then you are ok.
[Skip this if the track pathes are correct in GPxPatch]
If the track pathes are wrong (e.g. pointing in the Circuits folder which is WRONG) you have to adjust manually. First, you need to know the exact order of the tracks as they are played during your season in the game. To know that, go in the Track folder and you will see a single file called xxxx.ini where xxxx is the year of your season. Open it and that's the exact track order (this file is written by TSM when importing a season trackpack or when manually assigning tracks for a profile). Now, still in the Track folder, navigate through the mod track folders (those with your season's year label, not the PLUS-Trackpack ones!) and check if the dat files of the tracks are still located there. The track wad files may have been moved by CSM into the main directory (or elsewhere), this doesn't matter, but you MUST locate the dat files in order for GPxPatch to read them.
Now open again GpxPatch, go in the Track section and click on the Edit tab. Adjust all entries to fit exactly the order as in the xxxx.ini file by pointing to the dat files, usually in the Track folder in the track directories with the season's year in their names. Really get sure that the order is correct, the game will crash if you make mistakes!
E. Getting rid of unnecessary files to save hard disk space
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Files that can be deleted because not necessary for your mod to run are:
- All the default 2001 track wad files in your main game dir
- All the PLUS-Trackpack files in the Track Folder (they contain a PLUS directory and a default game track).
- If you have backed up the whole GPSAVES folder: Delete any other mod folders that have nothing to do with your mod. If you don't need to load anythng additional from here to activate in your mod then you can safely delete the whole backup.
F. Making mod choices in GPxPatch and running your new non-CSM mod
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Make a shortcut from GPxPatch.exe in your non-CSM mod and call it GP4-xxxx (your season year). Alternatively, point to the GP4.exe from within your mod utility to launch or read the files in your non-CSM folder. Be warned that launching the game without GPxPatch will give unpredictable results, especially any additional mod textures, anims, videos, icons etc. will not show-up in the game, therefore... better launch it with GPxPatch unless you know exactly what you do
About Performance Files (GPxSet)All performance files should correctly be located in the gpxpdata folder, usually 17 different files if your mod has set the car performances for each track. If not so, check if there is a
Generic Performance File that you can use. All this will also appear in the GPxSet section of GPxPatch. Here,
it is not necessary to set each track's performance files manually before playing a specific track, GPxPatch will do this automatically when you change tracks within the game, I have tested this. But if your mod doesn't have different performance files, then use a generic one if it exists and load it in the 'Performance File', don't forget to activate the checkbox in this case! Otherwise leave this field empty with the checkbox unchecked, so the in-game default performance will be used.
Visors enabled/disabledVisors can be enabled/disabled in the GP4Tweak.ini file. Before making changes in the file, I would make a backup of it and change the extension to txt. Also be sure to backup the GP4Tweak.bin (you should have done this already!).
For the 1991 mod: disabling/enabling the BBC Commentary:The sound files are in the gpxpdata\snd folder. In the snd folder, make a folder Commentary. Copy/paste the soundset.ini file into the Commentary folder. In the snd folder open to soundset.ini and delete everything after [Events], this will disable the commentary. In the Sound section of GPxPatch just point to the relevant soundset.ini to get the Commentary or not.
If you run in trouble and the game crashesIf you have done all correctly above you should not experience any crashes, sometimes GP4 will crash because the sound and the frame updates are out of synch, especially on fast machines. This will happen now and then and there's nothing you can do about, except making sure that your framerate setting is set at 30 FPS (and not at 60) as I adviced in Chapter A. However if GP4 always crashes in the last Weather screen (Last changes, just before going in the 3D world), then something is mistaken in your setup. You can do this to solve (in order):
- Check that in GPxPatch 'Enabled Debug mode' is activated and the verbosity set to at least Medium.
- Recopy the GP4Tweak.bin file from the backup into the main folder
- Do the above and recopy the decrypted GP4.exe 1.02 into your main folder
- You should not get any crashes anymore, have you removed some game files ?! I'm afraid you will have to recopy the content of your GP4_BACKUP folder (see Chapter B) and re-construct your non-CSM mod, sorry. In this case, first remove all your
savegames and
personal car setups from the GPSAVES folder into another safe folder and re-copy them back later.
Here the solutions for the most common GP4 game and CSM problems:Problem: The game often crashes when playing, especially after changing Car Setup.
Solution: On fast computers, the FPS setting in the Options should not be 60 FPS but 30 FPS. Unlock your F1graphics.cfg file, redo the Test, set the FPS to 30 and redo point 10 in Chapter A.
Problem: The game crashes if my Team companion leaves the pits together with me
Solution: Yes, GP4 will get confused...Wait until your companion has started.
Problem: I don't get the full replay time as set in the game Options
Solution: Set the Advanced grafics from Automatic to Manual and ensure that all settings except Mirror view are at maximum (let the Bump disabled)
Problem: The car grafics, the track grafics or other grafics are all wrong
Solution: Your Advanced grafic settings in the game are not set to Manual and maximum, change that.
Problem: CSM says I need a clean wad file to start the program
Solution: Re-copy the decrypted GP4.exe in your game dir
Problem: CSM says I need a higher version of CSM to play the mod
Solution: Hahaha...there is no higher version, that's a nice one eh? Ok, open your main [your mod].csm and remove or edit the version entry to be lower.
Problem: CSM will not launch my mod, it restores it immediately after launch
Solution a) You have not installed the PLUS-Trackpack and your mod needs it. Deinstall the mod by deleting the mod folder in GPSAVES, de-install the mod trackpack, install the PLUS-Trackpack, re-install the mod and re-install the mod trackpack.
Solution b)
If you have built a CSM mod, then you know already that ALL your ini files in the Settings folder must be right, also your main [your mod].csm must have the correct entries! Additionally, you must have all GPxPatch files in the Data\GPxPatch, plus you MUST set the Debug Mode to 'Enabled' and Verbosity to Medium in GPxPatch.
Problem: I can see no Pitcrew or track personel
Solution a) It's becasue you have set the Pitcrew grafic option to Highest, you must set it to High only (happens only with mods when chosing Hi resolutions). Redo the Test dance as explained in Chapter A.
Solution b) Copy your F1graphics.cfg and put it outside the game directory. Run the game and quit on main menu. Paste (and overwrite) your F1graphics.cfg back in the game.
Problem: Oops...All the driver and team names are gone, I see only a slash /
Solution: delete your f1gstate.sav, run the game and quit. Next time you start the names will show again.
Things that I have tested
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I have tested the CSM mod Season 1991, the most legendary and meaningful mod in my opinion and it's also the most complex one from how it has been built and the big content of cars, animations, even BBC commentaries in the sound etc. This mod perfectly works, and what's more: the entire edit of Damage.ini is carried over in the non-CSM mod, because CSM writes the content in the GP4.exe file. Therefore a tip here:
Tip: If you want to use special settings from the Damage.ini file in your non-CSM mod, I think you can simply re-run the procedure in Chapter D when starting the CSM mod, but after ALT-TAB you simply copy/paste the GP4tweak.bin and the GP4.exe, that's it, you will play with the new Damage.ini settings.
Or if you have a native non-CSM mod (e.g. the 2002 Season): Then build a CSM mod in CSM > Ohter Stuff, then setup the Damage.ini, setup all ini files (which alas is MUCH more complicated than all this procedure here!), then run the build in CSM, and intercept / copy / Paste the GP4.exe and GP4Tweaker.bin to another location. That's it. If you now replace these files in your non-CSM mod you will drive with the settings made in the Damage.ini. But if you replace the GP4.exe with the decrypted one, then, the damage settings are gone of course.
What I have NOT tested in 1991 mod is: what happens if you chose 'Full Season' instead of 1st GP of the season. When chosing Full Season the mod will write a cars.wad for every track, so this may spell trouble with my system, but I don't care, I just chose the 1st GP instead, later all tracks will load correctly together with the cars. A Ferrari is red anyway :=))
Then I have tested several utilities, they all can read the new GP4.exe.
I will have to test other mods of course, but sincerly, I believe they will all work correctly like the 1991 mod.
Cases where you DON'T have to transform your mod
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Finally some words about when NOT using my system above.
At the start of this post I said that the reason for doing all this procedure is for using a mod without CSM for personal reasons like using a tool to enable or make settings that CSM doesn't support. Although some tools do not work with CSM, you can use them by applying a trick. This will save you time and you don't have to do all the system above. For example, I have tested this with GP4Tweaker:
Using CSM together with GP4Tweaker:
a) Make a backup of GP4.exe located in your main game dir.
b) Start CSM and setup your mod as desired, don't start the game yet.
c) Launch GP4Tweaker and make changes, then click Close, do not launch from the Tweaker. BUT: Be sure that those changes do not conflict with the Tweaker changes of CSM, otherwise your game will show unpredictable effects or most likely will crash !!
d) Now, click Start in CSM and launch your game.
I have tested this with GP4Tweaker and the Damage Coefficient, it works. I'll assume that other tweaks will also work if CSM doesn't touch them. This trick should also work with other tools like the Physics Editor etc.
Alas, before launching CSM again you will have to replace everytime the GP4.exe with the decrypted one caus' CSM will stupidly not accept a changed *.exe...you'll have to go with it, sorry...
Ok, this will conclude my transformation method, I know there are some other systems published, unfortunately I didn't get the links, so I tried one for myself and have shared it now, I hope this will be useful for you in some way.
Have fun with GP4 !!
XenonS
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Edited 65 time(s). Last edit at 09/13/2016 02:30PM by XenonS.