Conversions from Dirt Track Racing

Drive2Survive · Post by **Drive2Survive** » Sun Mar 07, 2004 7:38 am

Just wondering if anyone here knows how I might extract and convert the models from Ratbag's DTR game? (BigDOGGe? I know you at least have Powerslide...)

I downloaded the demo of <a href="http://www.3dgamers.com/games/dirttrackracingau/">Dirt Track Racing Australia</a>, and I want to drag the VT Commodore mesh out of it and convert it to bin format for evaluation for use in MTM2. Just wanted to check whether anyone knows how (or indeed if) it can be done before I knock myself out trying.

legwon · Post by **legwon** » Sun Mar 07, 2004 11:08 am

for most Ratbag games there is 1 editor. unfotuanatly it was not released to the public. it IS in circulation though if u can find it somewhere.
ive looked and looked and looked for it all over the place. i still cant find it.
its called "DE2 editor"

works for :
DTR
Leadfoot
DTR:spint cars
DTR2
and more.

legwon · Post by **legwon** » Sun Mar 07, 2004 11:55 pm

took another look around again today... guess what?
i found the DE2 editor but theres another problem with conversion of ratbag vehicles. de2 only exports/saves as csv files, that ive seen.
http://ip.fuo-motorsports.com/SimArchiv ... nload/593/

but there is a DE2 filter for (i believe) 3ds max. but the prog itself costs hundreds of dollars.

either way, u will need the extracting program from the game cd's called "extractpf.exe", to extract the DE2 file from a "pod" type of file.

maybe oleg will have some luck with this.

Drive2Survive · Post by **Drive2Survive** » Mon Mar 08, 2004 1:44 am

Thanks for that, leg, that's a big help.

3ds max isn't a real problem for me - I have a demo version (fully-enabled, 30 day trial) of 3ds max 5 which could probably apply the filter. Failing that, I might just be mad enough to not be above manually editing a Comma Seperated Values (csv) text file and write an obj.

But there's a problem with that extractpf utility - when I tried it on the data.pf archive from the DTRAU demo, it threw an error stating "packed file is version 2, only version 1 is supported". So, I'm not real sure what that's all about. Either I need a different version of the utility, or the cunning bastards have locked the files of the demo to stop people modding it and generally having too much fun to go out and buy a retail copy.

It's not too big an issue if I can't take a snoop at the models, I was just curious. I'll see if there is a different version of extractpf to be had...

legwon · Post by **legwon** » Mon Mar 08, 2004 2:32 am

try this one. it may or maynot work. im not sure. this one is from dtr spint cars. the pryer is from leadfoot.
http://legwon.biz/tmp/dtrsc_extractpf.zip

>> or the cunning bastards have locked the files of the demo

always a possibility.:/

>> maybe oleg will have some luck with this.
i cant even get over there today. looks like big server problems for them.

edit.
-finally got over to NFScheats to get a hold of oleg, and sent him a message about the DE2 files.
-just went and got the demos for both DTRau and DTR sprint cars. seems that you were right about them.
>>the cunning bastards have locked the files of the demo
the demo's wernt packed with the same program as the full versions were. im getting that error that u stated D2S.
"packed file is version 2, only version 1 is supported"

ch_2005 · Post by **ch_2005** » Mon Mar 08, 2004 4:54 pm

I saw leadfoot for sale at a store near here for about $5 or $6. Is it worth it? I trust u guys not to steer me wrong. How editable is it?

Drive2Survive · Post by **Drive2Survive** » Mon Mar 08, 2004 9:41 pm

the demo's wernt packed with the same program as the full versions were.

I was starting to think that. Clearly the utility can recognise the file, but refuses to do anything with it. The readme for the DTRAU demo states that "You cannot modify data - e. g. create custom car skins (paint jobs) - in the demo of DTR Australia", which is fair enough, but their locking all the data files certainly caught me off guard.

Dang proprietry file formats. Oh well, I'm sure I'll find something else. Thanks for riding with me this far

I saw leadfoot for sale at a store near here for about $5 or $6. Is it worth it?

I (lamentably) haven't played it myself so I can't say anything, other than Ratbag's games are always good (but I'm Australian so I'm biased [:P]). The readme for the extractpf utility leg sent me indicates that you can add your own data for virtually anything to the game - but for the most part you'd only be looking at custom skins, and editing the car parameters (power etc). But geez man, unless you're saving up for something, for five bucks you can't go far wrong!

Cale · Post by **Cale** » Mon Mar 08, 2004 9:59 pm

Leadfoot is incredible. Its really like playing the old Super Off-Road arcade game. The career mode takes a lot of time to play through, but it is well worth it. For that price, get it.

legwon · Post by **legwon** » Tue Mar 09, 2004 3:35 am

>>Is it worth it? I trust u guys not to steer me wrong. How editable is it?

i have leadfoot. its a pretty good game as far as playability and control, but editability.... its not . until the file format is put into an easier editor(as far as im concerned) it can only be skinned. re.. repainting the vehicles. same goes for almost any ratbag game. eg. DTR, DTR2, etc...

take a look for your self....
DE2 Editor
http://ip.fuo-motorsports.com/SimArchiv ... nload/593/
Leadfoot car files
http://legwon.biz/tmp/leadfootcars.zip

all u can see is the vert points. cant see the faces or the actual model until u click on a certain set.

Malibu350 · Post by **Malibu350** » Tue Mar 09, 2004 2:07 pm

I converted one of those csv's to wavefront format with editpad so if anyone can get their hands on the Commodore.csv there's hope.

ch_2005 · Post by **ch_2005** » Wed Mar 10, 2004 10:43 pm

well yea it's not too bad - i used excel
<a href="http://ch.zrecon.net/lf/lfadvance.bin"><img src="http://ch.zrecon.net/lf/advance.png"></a>
<img src="http://ch.zrecon.net/lf/advancess.png">
<img src="http://ch.zrecon.net/lf/advancetex.png">
anyone wanna give a shot at mapping that one?
click the bin to download the bin.

Malibu350 · Post by **Malibu350** » Wed Mar 10, 2004 11:36 pm

bluefuzz huh? :o) nice...

I was too lazy err busy to plot the 1200 faces on duneboy lol

legwon · Post by **legwon** » Thu Mar 11, 2004 3:41 am

ne1 here any good with hex editing?

i d/l'd the demo of DTR:sprint cars, and took a look to compare with retail version(which i have).
i cant see much of anything, but then i can barely replace a bin texture in a hexediter... lol.

here are the demo files. 23mb
here are the full retail files. 130mb

the only real big difference i see is that the demo doesnt have a "min.pf" file. which is where the vehicles are stored in the retail ver. so im guessing that the vehicles are in the exe file.
when i was looking in the data.pf, i noticed some intergers and track names. i didnt see anything in the min.pf like that. but like i said im not very good and that kind of stuff.

Drive2Survive · Post by **Drive2Survive** » Thu Mar 11, 2004 9:50 pm

>> anyone wanna give a shot at mapping that one?

If it remains unclaimed, I'll give it go when I get some time (which might take a while).

>> im guessing that the vehicles are in the exe file.

It would be highly unusual to merge game assets - especially models and textures - directly into the executable. It can be done but it's very unwieldly and impractical in almost every scenario, so it would really surprise me if they've done it here. It's more likely, I think, that they've just packed the cars into a different pf archive for the demo.

Drive2Survive · Post by **Drive2Survive** » Thu Mar 11, 2004 10:27 pm

Aaah Haaa!

<a href="http://www.bhmotorsports.com">This site</a> has downloads of the DTRAU cars converted to DTR2:
http://www.bhmotorsports.com/download/732 <-- the skins
http://www.bhmotorsports.com/download/733 <-- the chassis (models & data)

So, now I'll hafta see just what I can do with these de2 files...

legwon · Post by **legwon** » Fri Mar 12, 2004 2:36 am

sweet deal D2S. good luck!

ch_2005 · Post by **ch_2005** » Fri Mar 12, 2004 5:47 pm

I'm decent at hex editing and reverse enginering - i reverse engineered the skinning system for ss2000 but i'd bet that the ratbag games haev already been explored pretty well.

Drive2Survive · Post by **Drive2Survive** » Fri Mar 12, 2004 8:52 pm

Well that was an interesting way to spend an evening! I was about to start converting the CSV by hand, but balked at the 700+ lines of values. I decided it would be a lot more fun (for all concerned) to have a program to do this for me... so I wrote one myself. CSV2OBJ

It's written in C and uses popup messageboxes for user interaction, which isn't the best interface I could've designed, but it does the job [:P]
Use the DE2 Editor to export the object of your choice as "Unique Polygons", and save the resultant CSV file into a folder with the CSV2OBJ.exe program. Double-click CSV2OBJ.exe and it will search the local directory for files with a .CSV extension. For each one it finds, it asks if you want to the file converted to an OBJ file; click Yes and it will then attempt to do so. If all goes well, you should end up with an OBJ file that you can hopefully import into BinEdit. It will appear with the faces inverted, but you just need to select everything and flip 'em to fix that.
Now you can spend all your time mapping it instead of pushing numbers around [cool]

Notes.
- The numbers stored in the CSV (that I've seen anyway) for vertex coords are floating-point numbers written to six decimal places. To preserve fidelity, when the program performs the file conversion these numbers are multiplied by 1 million and written as an integer. (This doesn't make any difference to BinEdit, which rescales the OBJ when read.)
- There's not much data checking, so I can't predict or guarantee what the results will be if you feed it a malformed CSV file. There are checks in place to stop if the numbers read from file exceed the program's face or vertex capacities however, which caught the deliberately incorrect file I tested it on.
- I've only really tested this on the Commodore CSV, but it works reliably for that and I've no reason to expect it not to work with any other CSV exported from DE2Edit (I'll probably go back and try a few others myself soon).

That's all. Go have some fun [<-)]

Malibu350 · Post by **Malibu350** » Fri Mar 12, 2004 9:34 pm

> it would be a lot more fun (for all concerned) to have a program to do this for me... so I wrote one myself.

Ya know I was about to suggest that very thing last night but but... decided not to for whatever reason... Anyway, well done D2S and thank you I'll run it through some test subjects when I get back to work.

> It will appear with the faces inverted, but you just need to select everything and flip 'em to fix that.

Or, you could tweak your utility to reverse the face point numbers :o) ..No biggie tho since it takes all of 5 seconds to flip em in BE heh

>... the program performs the file conversion these numbers are multiplied by 1 million and written as an integer. (This doesn't make any difference to BinEdit, which rescales the OBJ when read.)

In case anyone's not aware, BE2 will import obj's to whatever scale you preset within the import dialog.

Cheers man [cheers] for yet another cool mtm2 utility!

ch_2005 · Post by **ch_2005** » Fri Mar 12, 2004 11:40 pm

some pretty impressive things have been done in the lf moding world:
http://www.geocities.com/r3_32002/
umm the tracks and trucks are stored int he same file format as far as i know - i just wonder how it is thet they aerepainted. err. maybe it's easier with tracks cause theya e just tiles or somthing
well yea good luck with this all lol.