Project CARS Modding Questions & WIP

[JDougNY]

Fantastic work, thanks to all the team for all the fantastic cars you guys have given us. Will tracks ever be possible?

Tracks are not possible, due to needing the developers SDK to create some of the files needed. Been this way for all of the more recent SMS games (NFS Shift, S2U, TDFRL and pCars)
[side note] I was only able to add Xbox DLC tracks to NFS Shift, by byte flipping the physics mesh file and converting the SGB file via a tool made by a coder. Well...and literally thousands of other hex edits.

 

[gregman]

Thanks for the fast reply

 

[walken]

@JDougNY for president! NOW !!!
Thank youuuuuu !!!

 

[Jerec]

Yes, absolutely! Thanks for all the cars and thanks in advance for further great cars in pCars 2!

 

[LamboMantisMan23]

pCARS2 will pretty much be unmoddable. They said this:

"The modding restriction is because SMS have built their own IP and want to protect that. It's a business decision."

"To be honest, I don't think pCARS2 is the type of product that modding fits well with:

It’s complex, detailed, broad and will be updated frequently with content and patches. Also the evolving nature of the tyre and physics model (being relatively ‘new’) would make it difficult to create modding tools and guides without all the overhead of keeping them updated.

Really, pC2 has enough out of the box. I doesn’t need modding as a must to complete anything"

 

[JDougNY]

pCARS2 will pretty much be unmoddable. They said this:

"The modding restriction is because SMS have built their own IP and want to protect that. It's a business decision."

"To be honest, I don't think pCARS2 is the type of product that modding fits well with:.......

The consoles are where they are making their money. So, it makes sense to lock things down and go with where the money is. (which is) Making another Forza type game which milks people for money via DLC. On the PC side of things, the lack of modding causes an early death for PC2. Seeing as they are attempting to compete with Forza, they should decrease the cost of PC2 to $25.00, because they only have about 1/3 of the content of a Forza Motorsport game.

Well....time to see if any other sim interests me...tried a few and don't like them.

 

[walken]

@JDougNY, got lot of fun with pc1 and your wonderful cars! Hope you will keep on working on this ! Hot hatch is awesome, maybe some car a bit understeering for me, but delta is fantastic. Stay with us !!!

 

[gvse]

The statement quoted by lambomantisman didn't come from an sms employee/representative. It's a forum user expressing his opinion.
The truth is we have to wait and see if the game can be opened for modding. Right now it looks bleak but PC1 wasn't supposed to have any mods either.

 

[JDougNY]

@JDougNY, got lot of fun with pc1 and your wonderful cars! Hope you will keep on working on this ! Hot hatch is awesome, maybe some car a bit understeering for me, but delta is fantastic. Stay with us !!!

The FWD cars will tend to understeer under power and/or if going into corners too fast.

 

[LamboMantisMan23]

The statement quoted by lambomantisman didn't come from an sms employee/representative. It's a forum user expressing his opinion.
The truth is we have to wait and see if the game can be opened for modding. Right now it looks bleak but PC1 wasn't supposed to have any mods either.

They were agreeing with Ian Bell, who said this:

"No. We have an insane amount of content though with more to come. We debated the mod thing for a long time and came to the conclusion that we wanted every video out there so shout quality. This isn't something we can do with mods unless we moderate them and that opens up a whole can of worms where we could insult people by setting the bar high.

I'm not ruling it out in the future but our main aim for now is to deliver so much content that you won't feel you're missing anything.

On the former, apologies, it's changed so much day to day I'm unsure of the current position. I've pushed it like hell though.

On the latter, Crapping myself as always. I've/we've put everything we have into this one, I think it's fair to say more so than ever before. We think we've just created the best racing game ever made, but we'll see... I can say that I felt the same sort of passion from the team this time around that I felt when we created GTR2 (and 85% of those guys/girls are still with us). It's that passion which makes all the difference and I hope it's evident for all.

Things are much more complex now. We set the bar really stupidly high in terms of improvements from pCARS1 to 2 and I think we hit about 95% of that bar. It won't be absolutely perfect in every area, nothing is, but I do in all humility feel it's the best racer ever shipped. We'll continue to patch and improve as our fans deserve of course. There are a few areas that I think are slightly less than as perfect as they could be. So yes, we'll keep hitting those for at least a year. Then we'll raise the bar again for the next one"

Then separately he said:

"Our last analysis showed that 40% of the car mods were stolen from other games, including ours. This was one of the key reasons for us not overtly supporting mods."

 

[robi3381]

I wonder where he found this analysis, almost every car mod, except the R8 lms, were "stolen" from other games. But what we modders do is not just take a car from a game and put it in pcars, there is a lot of work between the blank 3d model we "steal" (stealing is exagerated, they don't loose anything...) and the final car. That's why there are so few good mods. And if we wanted to make mods from scratch, there would only have one or maybe two more mods than the R8, and the game would already be dead since a long time.

 

[DeltaDox]

Might be a little too late to ask, but does anyone know if the track sponsoring is modifiable/changeable?

I'm wanting to change the sponsors on Mount Panorama to look like how it is in real life e.g Supercheap Auto logos, Sign Event, Falken Tyres, Westrac Cat ect...

 

[JDougNY]

Might be a little too late to ask, but does anyone know if the track sponsoring is modifiable/changeable?

I'm wanting to change the sponsors on Mount Panorama to look like how it is in real life e.g Supercheap Auto logos, Sign Event, Falken Tyres, Westrac Cat ect...

You would need to run the track BFF files unpacked, then you could replace the textures. If this is something you would like to pursue, I could setup the unpacked files for you and force pCars to use the loose files. It would apply as a mod, for which you could rework textures and activate the mod whenever you wish.
Warning - running the track files unpacked takes a little longer to load in game.

 

[DeltaDox]

You would need to run the track BFF files unpacked, then you could replace the textures. If this is something you would like to pursue, I could setup the unpacked files for you and force pCars to use the loose files. It would apply as a mod, for which you could rework textures and activate the mod whenever you wish.
Warning - running the track files unpacked takes a little longer to load in game.

Thanks for the reply dude. I will take it into consideration because I'm still relatively new with BFF Files. I've only ever worked around Assetto Corsa. But I will let you know when I am ready to take it on

 

[galaxymess]

So, is pCARS 2 moddable or not? Is it possible to convert pcars 1 cars to pcars 2?

 

[LamboMantisMan23]

So, is pCARS 2 moddable or not? Is it possible to convert pcars 1 cars to pcars 2?

I mean, it’s not two different to the first game.
No new file formats. But there’s new material shaders, and the 3D files are using obfuscation to stop us ripping the models. I managed to get hold of the huracan files from the beta (I think from Doug through Maris?) before they were locked down and compared them to the new ‘encrypted’ version. The difference
is that 4 bytes every 12 bytes are obfuscated in some way.
What I mean is easily visible by using xoring the original file with
the new one and watching the obtained file with a hex editor.

This sort of obfuscation covers only a part of the meb file so it's
applied to specific data of this format and note to the whole file
as-is.

I don't know what obfuscation is used, but there are a lot of 0xaa
bytes when you xor the 2 files.
Considering that it's a list of 32bit float numbers (X axis of
XYZ coordinates of something?) it may be just a float-related math
operation used as obfuscation, for example:
1.583825246319139e-314 -> 3.458537934047377e-315

I don’t know if the game with read decrypted MEBs, but if it does, there maybe some hope

 

[gvse]

Here's PC2 modding discussion: http://www.racedepartment.com/threads/project-cars-2-modding-discussions.141370/

 

[IBOOFF]

to gvse and JDougNY.
thank's a lot for all of your works!!
the pcars2 no good for me, original (pcars) - the best, I think.
so please tell me, can you convent the lambo pack from pcars2 to pcars or only one lambo - sesto (love that devil, it's miss in pcars). sorry for bad english, and thak you very mach, one small.

 

[gvse]

well, we have been slowly working on PC2 cars and have no intention of going back to PC1.
Additionally, the mebs (3d files) of PC2 are encrypted so most likely the game will crash/fail to load these files as PC1 is not designed to read and load them.

 

[KoeleKoen]

only possible if you get BFF files from before the crypting,it is possible though,I have certain cars transferred from 2 to 1