Well, following a bit of sleep I checked again and I DID save part 3, at least an early version of it. But I saved it in a weird place which is why I got confused. Apologies to my cat, especially; although the bandages do make him look kind of heroic so it's not all bad.
OK, let's get focussed. We are about to enter the Zone of Hard Toil. But speaking of cats, you've probably heard that there is more than one way to skin one. Well, what I've written below (and above) is just my way of doing things OK? Some won't like it at all and others will notice unintentional errors, but it's what I have ended up doing in the 2+ years that I've been messing around with GP4. Certainly, I'm not an expert, nor do I claim to be, so anything I say here which clashes with anything in anyone else's thread or post, especially this one, should be disregarded as the mindless ramblings of a fool. In addition I can take no responsibility if listening to my advice causes you to destroy your PC and burn your house down.
Part 3: The MD file.Each circuit can have it's own unique MD file, but it doesn't have to have one. In fact, when you first download them, quite a few don't (including the 17 originals IIRC). Nevertheless, as a relentless tweaker I consider them an essential component of a circuit and sooner or later I create one for every track I use.
Because each track has different characteristics
there can be no such thing as an MD file that can be used for all circuits. However, I have occasionally borrowed an MD file from another circuit to save time when the one included didn't feel right and I wasn't entirely sure what to do to make it better. There's a particular street circuit, I can't remember which one, which is kind of sluggish and annoying to drive with the MD supplied and I recall swapping it out with one from a different street circuit to great effect. Be aware though, that this is not a good strategy to adopt as a first recourse because you can seriously mess up things like pit lane entry and/or many other things. Copy and pasting small sections across from one to the other is usually safer.
Here's the info you need to get started with MDs.
For the purposes of this part of the tutorial, it'll make things easier if you start working with one of the original 17 circuits with a nice long straight, such as Hockenheim, Spa or Monza. Then, once you get the hang of what I'm about to run through with you, you'll find it easier to make any other circuit perform the way you want it too.
I'm guessing you know how to extract or create an MD file for a circuit. If not, there might be a tutorial somewhere or you could just fire up cmagic4_102.exe and give it a whirl. It's intuitive and easy to use. I tend to name the MD files along the lines of 1989Montreal.md3 etc, because I've modified a set of other peoples' mods to allow for a modest 2% increase in performance year on year, covering the years 1978-1993*, which is when my interest in F1 was keenest, ie before Senna was taken from us.
(Yeah, I'm so old I used to have to load up my PC with a bucket of coal each morning, back when the climate change scammers were bashing on about the impending Ice Age and the earliest arcade racing games moved the pixelated scenery around the stationary car! How times have changed...)
*No, in case you were wondering, currently there are no mods for 1978 or '81 as far as I know. Mine are homebrew kludges using amateurishly re-edited cars from '75, '79, '80 and '82. Hopelessly inaccurate and absolute heresy for some no doubt, but not for me, as it was important to have at least one mod containing drivers like James Hunt and Ronnie Petersen, both long gone, who got me into F1 in the first place. It's also easier to learn new tracks in a mod where the cars are less powerful. The old reaction times ain't what they used to be.
But to get back on point. In other words, when I first loaded up the 1990 mod, I could get an MD that was pretty close to what I wanted by using the 1989 MD file for that circuit which I made the previous season. (If that's unclear you'll see what I mean as we go on).
Oh, and here's another aside. (I'm tired and I ramble much more when I'm sleep deprived). For what it's worth, I don't actually use the real-world circuits. Instead, I re-arrange each mod year to include different circuits to the year before and the year after and bring in many (but by no means all) of the fantastic aftermarket circuits we have available too. I still use the real-world results to generate historically accurate PFs for each race each year, but I swap out tracks I don't care much for, such as Monaco, and replace them with a similar circuit that I do enjoy, like Detroit for example and so over the 16 year mod span I race some circuits up to five times, while others, like Monaco again, only once. I also fix each season to a strict 15 races too because it makes managing my ever-developing PF Calculator spreadsheet easier to manage. But that's just me. I'm not a purist, which can be annoying to some people...
Anyway, the MD lines we are interested in right now are:
desc1 through to desc33, (These are the wing settings for the CC cars, your car and the same again for wet conditions).
desc53 through to desc64, (These don't apply to your car, only the CC cars).
and desc42 (This affects CC cars and the player car).
Let's start from the bottom and work upwards.
Desc 42 - Master/track gripThis is something like a master grip setting for the circuit it is applied to. Changes here affect all cars, including yours. Most of the time this variable won't need changing (especially with the original 17 circuits supplied with the game), but you'll probably find that some of the aftermarket circuits are just a bit too slippery, however much you play with your wings and suspension set up etc, so you might want to increase the value of desc 42 by a hundred or so and keep repeating that until you find a value that feels right.
Conversely, there are also one or two tracks which have too much grip by default (just my opinion). It's fun to drive like this, but if you want to keep it real you'll want to make the circuit just a little tougher to drive by lowering the value of desc 42.
I think of this as balancing the circuit in relation to the others, but as I say, most of the time it'll be just fine as it is. Generally, most circuits will have a desc42 value of between 15000 and 17500. There are one or two exceptions to this, such as the excellent Phoenix circuit that has a default value of 20000, which seems to be necessary for that circuit mainly because of a slightly inefficient CC-line on one corner, ie set the desc=42 value any lower and you'll hit one particular wall too often. Ideally the solution would be to modify the DAT file to adjust the CC line but I'm totally out of my depth when it comes to things like that and always make a mess. (All hail the track builders. We are so fortunate to have had so many bless us with their talents).
Remember that in real life, some circuits have a reputation for offering more grip than others. Some are baby skin smooth with shiny new tarmac while others are bumpy, oily, covered in marbles and worn out, so it's not a question of making a circuit behave the same in terms of grip, it's more about making a particular circuit feel right in relation to the others. I don't make a habit of messing with this value, but from time to time I notice a track is a bit of an odd man out and I bring it into line.
Anyway, that's what you use to resolve all that: desc 42.
Getting your car up to speed.We're getting there mralpha, just like I promised! But before we dive into the MD some more, we need to backtrack a little. I've never seen too many hints on this entire process, so this is all completely homebrew, but here's what I do when it comes to regulating the speed and my car and the CC cars. It's a bit long-winded, but I can usually refine a newly-acquired track's MD to suit my taste within about 20mins - and by and large, once it's done, it's done for good (with one or two caveats, explained below). Remember however that many of the tracks have great MDs to start with, so it's not like you'll have to do them all!
Now
if I were to do this (see my closing comments), first, I work on the power values relating to my car only (which were determined back in the PF). Don't worry about the CC cars just yet.
Grab yourself one of the better cars (that's important) and go out on a fast track (like Hockenheim) with minimal wing (ie 2 or 3). Note down your top speed on the longest straight and make sure the car is not hitting the rev limiter in top gear. There are several ways to check this and most mods have some kind of rev counter built in, but if not the easiest way is simply to listen to the engine note. If it is topping out, go into car setup in the game and stretch your gear ratios until you can hit your fastest speed in top gear and still have a few revs to spare (to allow for slipstreaming). I say stretch because the bottom gear (ie 1st), is probably OK where it is (we'll see later on why this is). As a guide, each increase of 1 in your top gear value represents a fall in revs of around 400rpm at top speed.
At this point, if you want to make your top speed higher or lower (as you requested Mr A), you can go back into the performance file and adjust the power values in there like we discussed earlier (or you can use PRBlanco's Perf. Calculator spreadsheet to do this quicker if you have it), remembering to re-check your gear ratios on the track after you've increased the power in the PF to make sure you're not up against the rev-limiter again.
OK. Happy with that top speed of yours now? Then let's get back into our MD and bring all this to fruition. Part 3.2 follows shortly.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/19/2018 08:28PM by Noog.