I Give Up on Toyota

I've been trying all night to get a Toyota to work in the Prost slot.

All the ones I've found are high resolution ones only and my feeble attempts to convert the textures to the standard type res have been for naught, even after reading every tutorial I could find on the wonderful world of the Web.

I'm going back to have some more "talks" with Mr. Jose Cuervo I think after this fiasco tonight...

If anyone has a Toyota posted that will work in the Prost slot, with standard resolution textures, I would dance at your wedding if you made it downloadable.

read the tutorial at max downforces's site? gpxcarpaingting? cant remember the url... also tried LO2K's livery editor?

Yep, I read Max's tutorial...very informative, just my stupid a$$ can't seem to get it to work. I'm missing something I'm sure, just not sure what besides patience tonight after 4 miserable failed attempts.

I haven't tried the Livery Editor...might be my next attempt after a few more "questions" for Mr. Cuervo...

The toyota I use is using the prost slot.... <?>





AMD64 3400+ (running at 2,66ghz atm )DDR400 1gb(running at 433) Asus K8N-E Deluxe mobo, 6800ultra, Tagan tg-480w, Audigy 2Zs, Logitech Z-5500 speakers
Using X-aser Lanfire case with 5 fans inside cathodelights etc included aswell :P

I give up on trying to get a couple of the '03 Toyotas to work in the Prost slot. I'm not running hi-res textures and all of them I could find were hi-res cars.

I took a '02 TF102 that was made for the Minardi slot, but used custom textures and renamed the .lods to work in the Prost slot. Works great. Since I'm not driving the Toyota, I wanted it more for representation when seeing it on the track, as well as in the TV camera views.

If nothing else, I did learn a bit about texture sizes and the hi-res and regular res .tex's. So it wasn't a total loss. I know there's some differences between the 102 and 103 models, but it's nothing I can't deal with.

The FAQ at Max's site is actually by Knight and it doesn't address the differences between hi-res and regular res .texs, nor the proper way to convert the former to the latter, but it's still very informative on the basics of GP4 graphics structure. I just went through this forum, post by post, and found most of the info I needed in 7-8 threads, going back to about Feburary of this year.



Post Edited (07-03-03 10:45)

the differences between hi-res and regular res .texs, nor the proper way to convert the former to the latter,

depending on your settings your game will either use Hi_ or normal.
I've set it too Hi_ and deleted all the normal ones for a slimmer wad.
having Hi_ tho doesnt mean you'll get hi res textures, as its based on the sizes.
why do you use normal ones? slow pc?

I've got the Toyota 103 by Erwin Maliepaard & Guyon Waltmans. Its fine and looks good.¨
I used a hex editor to rename the tex calls to toyota2003 (from prost).
And renamed the lods to minardi (for slot 10) and it works fine.



____
Tony

Yep, slow PC...P3 933. I can run the hi-res textures, but I'm much more concerned about smooth gameplay and lower PO than am I about how another car looks at 250KPH simulated... But I would like to have correct liveries. It's just me being anal, especially since I can't see the correct placement of ads and such on the liveries during a race.

I'm not concerned with the 2003 pit order slots, so renaming it to use the Minardi slot isn't anything I care to get into. That would just lead to having to download pit textures and everything else to emulate the 2003 season. And renaming another 4 sets of .lods to match the pit order.

Everything I've found in the texture department is more about upsizing textures than controlling the size of the. Tex Editor 2.0 is supposed to allow me to import a .tga into a .tex to replace the image, but for some reason it's not doing it. I extracted the hi-res textures to .tga's, resized them in PSP, and tried to import them into Tex Editor. It's not replacing the texture for some reason when I do the import function.

Anyway, the '02 TF102 is serving the purpose for now until I can figure out a way to resize a .tex to the size I want it to be, not just upsizing, like Tex Resizer does.

Do you have an email address Toby?



____
Tony

Sure thing, b-tone...

<gambler_78th@hotmail.com>

Just remove the <>...not sure if spambots troll this forum or not.

erm..... are you just changing the .lod filenames and not the .tex ones. Coz at the moment my minardi is in the prost slot using minardi textures, whilst my toyota is in the minardi slot using, prost/toyota textures (forget which) sounds confusing, but it works

For the TF102 to work (as it's doing now), I'm just changing the .lod file names. The .tex names for this particular model are custom named, "toyota02.tex" IIRC. ALl the tutorials and help I've found here at this forum explain that the .texs are assigned to the .lods by name and it doens't matter what name the .lods are as long as the .tex's name is correct, such as what you've said with your Bernardi in the Prost slot, using Bernardi textures.

My big problem now is getting Tex Editor 2.0 to import a .tga into an exisiting .tex. For some reason, it's not overwriting the current image in the .tex when I try this. I've used Tex2T to export the .tga's from the hi-res .texs, resized them in PSP to regular resolution .tga size, then tried to import them into .texs or even make new .texs the correct size.

Currently, the TF102 works fine and meets the need for me. There are a couple of other cars that have corrected liveries (the EJ13. MP-4/17D) that is only available in hi-res and when trying to replace the regular resoultion .texs with resized .tga's in Tex Editor, that's when I'm having the problems now.

Edit - There are a couple TF103's out there that I can get to work, but they only have the 0 level .lod and to get them to work in all camera angles, I have to make the 1-4 .lods, using the hi-res textures. Doing this and having the lesser .lods at a larger size than normal takes up quite a bit more PO (at least 15-18 percent in my tests), which is what I'm trying to optimize.



Post Edited (07-03-03 18:52)

Im using Fusion's lower lods, they're not great, but at least it lowers my PO, tho it increases my wad size coz of the way he names his files.

if the car is based on an orignal shape then the original lower lods might be good enough. test it in genius.
i think one toyota is based on bar and the lower bar lods are ok. but you'll have to change the tex calls.
(you'll have a toyota coloured bar shape far away. copy the lod_0 from the download to lod_1 and the original shapes for lod_2 -> lod_4)



____
Tony

I finally just gave up on Tex Editor 2.0 and made some textures with GP4 Master. I think I was successful, but I've got another problem now when I tried to make regular res textures for the EJ13 from some updated ones I downloaded.



The .texs were the same exact size as the ones I replaced. The .tgas were identical in size and makeup as the original ones. I tried the .texs downsampled and not downsampled, too. It's like only half the car is now being covered with the .tex or something. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

some textures are corrupt and cant be written over.
and you get black normally. like yours.

soln:
find a tex that isnt corrupt and use it with gp4master:
load (the uncorrupted)
downsample
save as (new file name so the 'good' tex remains for next time)

(dont know how to find wether a tex is corrupt or not. maybe they originls are ok? i use a benetton from the 1995 mod)



____
Tony

If I put the originals in game, they display just fine. Just not with the latest livery as the originals where from the Jordan test car I believe.

It's just when I replace them with the textures I made, so it's got to be something I'm doing wrong. Wouldn't be the first time. Or the last, I'm sure.

My .tex problem is solved. At least this time.

I'm not sure if it had anything to do with it, but I made sure the .tga was the same name as the .tex I was trying to import it in to. I remembered that earlier versions of WinMip for GPL required that. So I tried it and bingo!...my new EJ13 textures work in-game.

It was either that or I had a bad "batch" of .tex's when I made them. Not being fully knowledgeable with the making of GP4 textures yet, I don't know if sometimes Murphy decides to inject his fabled law into the process or not.