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How to make your own car..........

Car Design Guide

A QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE - by Patrick Wisselo

updated 15-12-98

Before you start you need a few things, I will list them below with the links to get them.

First of all there are the TOOLS,

MRC Cartools .....   to edit and model the car

Viv editor .......   to extact and build the car.viv file

Fedata editor    .......  to edit the ID's and info on the car

NFS3txt text file , its the advanced perfomance editing explanation

Cartool patch ..... it is a patch for NON-3DFX cards to work with Cartool (try it out if it works for your card)

Also you need the use of a text-editor, and a Paintprogram.

A LOT of good ideas, trust in yourself, patience and a lot of time!

Maybe last but not least a good plate of snackfood and a Cuba Libre to keep you awake !!!!

Here is the index:

Well let's get started.....

Take it all out.....

O.K. here we go.....

Well let's change the car model....

Let's change the ID, Info, Car Colors....

Editing the Carp.txt file....

Editing the Readme.txt file....

Putting all the pieces back together....

Starting up Need For Speed 3....

Well let's get started.....

The First thing to do is to think which CAR you like to model, you will need some pictures of it , the best of course are from the front/back/side and one for the overall picture of the car. Than the best way to model and save time, is to pick an existing NFS3 car to model it from, take one that looks the best like the one you are going to make..

Now you need to ask a Personal ID number on Halfmoons site http:/nfs3.tsx.org/ to look for a free ID number, email it to Halfmoon with your name and the car's name. As soon as you get an email back you'r free to use that number as your own !

Carefull do not  take an EDITED car , or make sure the maker of the car allows you to edit and modify his own car, see the readme files with the model or contact the author by email !!!! DO NOT COPY OTHER PEOPLES WORK.

Take it all out.....

Now we are going to make a new 4 letter directory in the nfs3\gamedata\carmodel\ directory. Give it a 4 letter name of your car, let's say it is called mine.  Lets say we take the Diablo, so copy the files of the Diablo to you're new directory. NOTE: by doing this you are now with 2 cars in the carmodel dir that use the same ID, it's no problem yet , but NFS3 will not start anymore at this time, we will change this later. If you feel like only changing a few minor things, and not making a whole new car at all, than go to an existing model and do not copy it, use that model for changing a few things and the game will still run.

But for all the ONES that are making a real good car copy it and I'll explain how to fix it later on. We don't have time to play NFS3 at the moment at all. So when it's copied go to the mine dir. and we now use the VIV editor or extractor to extract the car.viv file into all the files it was build out of. At this moment you will have a lot of files in your mine dir.

A brief explanation of a few of those files.

car.viv  - full nfs3 car file /  car.fce - model of the car used by Cartools / car00.tga  - the texture and mask file /   fedata.xxx - these are the language info files with the ID's of the car / that are the most important ones you are going to edit.

O.K here we go......

We will first take a look at the car00.tga file. It;s a TGA file which contains the texture-map of the car (like all the lights/logo's and for our model the SV logo also). Beware to save it right , because tga file can be saved in different ways, check always that the file stays 256kb of size .

Start your favourite Paint Program and we will start , by loading the car00.tga file. Zoom in 2 times and you can see the different sides of the car, one wheel, and a few other colors used for mirrors or spoilers. Here you see also the use for the front/side/back /top pictures of the car, but especially the front and back are important, beacuse these sides contain allways the lights. You also see almost always the back or in your mirror the front of the car, so take your time to make it look right. What do we do now, when you are a good designer , draw your own front or backside, if you can, scan the pictures  , they don't  need to be graphically HIGH resolution , because the images needed are small.  With copy and paste you can edit the car, I'm not going to explain that , that should be ready knowledge or look it up in your manual. Change the parts of the car you like to change, but be careful, do not try to change any of the black parts please, (it can give some trouble later on).

What you need now is the  masking function on your paint program (if it has one) If it does, change to the masking mode and here you see the MASK of the car. Normally you will only see Black / Grey and  White.   Important: Be Careful when changing black as it can cause trouble whith the opacity of the car. I had some troubles  with it myself, normally Black should be transparant. Just remember what I said and go ahead and experiment .Grey are the parts of the car that change color.  White are the parts that stay as they are seen in the car00.tga file and do not change color. So for the lights and wheels  you will use a white mask, and for the body you will use grey if you want to change the color. When making a lot of texture-advertisements on the car like on the Subaru WRC, the whole car body is also white because I do not want it to change color. If you edit some of the black parts , UNDO it please , it's easier to try again than to repair it later (if possible).So change the mask so it will fit your car  lights/ wheels / body or textures/logo's.

Save your file to car00.tga as you need it always and make a copy car00a.tga as a backup, and later on car00b.tga and so on.

NOTE : do not put to much effort in adjusting any part , as you will edit the carmodel later it will need a lot of adjustments in the car00.tga file again. Also because NFS3 will mirror the files be careful with text because on one side of the car it will be mirrored and difficult to read, he same for all the sides of the car (except for the Corvette Pacecar .. check it out)

Well let's change the CAR model....

Well we are going to change the carmodel now. We need MRC Cartools, (be aware you need a 3DFX card or the patch to work with it without a 3DFX card, I 'm not sure it works with every card , but as long as you wont give it a try you never now, provided by  Alien Dude). Start Cartools, it will now ask for a .fce file so seek the dir. mine and select the car.fce overthere.

MRC will now load your car and display it turning around, with your new texture applied to it.

You also see a few headers which you can change   with the cursor keys.

The first one Fuse Parts is used to change the location of the car parts. You can use the keys 1/ 2/ 3 / or in combination with shift to lower/rise move left/right or move forward/back.

The next one is for editing the car model it self, look good at every page you enter, there are the keys for changing the car at that page listed. Well enter it and press 'e' to enter the model of the car. Here you see only the body of the car with a wire frame and a lot of vertices (vertices are the 3D world points the car is build from). With CTRL and mouse you can select which vertex you want to edit. And with the  1/ 2/ 3 keys edit it , when using Shift also leave the mouse untouched or other wise strange things will happen , because when using shift you can also edit the vertex position using the mouse.

Change the model the way you like it , be aware of any changes made to the model will also effect your car textures. This is why you have to edit and edit and edit the car00.tga file so many times to line things up the right way.

Well press escape untill you are in the main menu again (if you press it once too much you will leave MRC, but your changes are saved when exiting MRC, so load it in again and get to the Main Menu)

Well there is a dummy object's header, go to that section and here you can add or delete or modify the place of the lights, I have nothin more to say about it just experiment with it.

In the  CAR texture header , go to that section. Now you see a screen with a few frames on it, somewhere left below there is your texture of the car. VERY Important: do NOT !!!!!!, I repeat NOT press the T or the P key as they say on that page, with T the texture is gone, and with P,  I had a lot of crashes and Hangups corrupting even the whole texture file car00.tga so make BACKUPS ! ( If there is someone out there who knows what to use the T and P key for and without any PC hangups, please let me know!!!)

Drag the small picture to the left upper corner, with the right mouse button , scale it to fit the whole page. The MASK you see here (in red of green ) is the mask that the car uses for putting your texture on the car. So look it up if everything is inside the red(or green) mask to see it on the car. If not try to draw a few things on a piece of paper , that need to be edited in car00.tga (if possible a screen dump would be handy , I did not try it ).Exit this screen again to the Main screen.

In the Car Color screen you can edit the colors of the car, first delete the existing one and replace them with your own ones, later you need also some names to edit in the Fedata editor, so write down the colors used and in the right order !!!

Well the UV tweeker option , I did not use it in my own cars , played a bit with it , but did not find it useful, maybe someone can tell me what to to with it.

Well we leave MRC Cartools now, your work wiill be saved when exiting. ( If you ever feel like making a backup , DO IT !)

Let's change the Car ID, info, color names and more....

Well we now will start with the Final Part of making a car, the Fedata editor. For every language (except the .fsh file ) there is a fedata.xxx file , where xxx stand for the language. Assuming that you will use the standard english version you will need to edit the Fedata.eng (and later on the other languages), (but everyone starts with the fedata.eng because it contains the most info of all the fedata files.)

Start the Fedata editor and it will ask for the fedata.eng file, so look it up in the mine dir, and select it. Here you see a few tabs on the page go to Geral (general) and here you will see a few things to change, CAREFUL to fill it in right or things can go really wrong, so your car won't start, and maybe even NFS3 won't. First of all change your car number here until you find your own you got from Halfmoon's site.Change the class of the car if necessary and of change identity to mine , the numbers for acelleration and so on, you have to change them only if you edit the performance of the car. So leave them the way they are right now.On the Car Data page ,the only really important one is the Car Name (in the game menu), so change it to identify your car in the car menu. The rest can be filled out or leave it blank or so.As for Engine and History it is just extra Info about your car, no need to change it , but if you make it good , look for the specifications of the car you are making. On the Color page you can change the names of the colors, as you did change them in MRC.

Well save your fedata.eng now and do the same as above for the other languages, the newest version of the fedata editor allows you also to edit the other languages by selecting the right language. Do the same as above for the other languages , as otherwise people around the world with an other language than english can not use it ! Leave the blank spaces blank ,as NFS3 uses the ones out of the fedata.eng file, but carefully fill in or change the other things so they are in the end all the same. Every time you finish one save it again .

Editing the CARP.txt file.....

One of the last things to do is to edit the carp.txt file. Open it with a text editor like wordpad or so. Some where in the beginning you will see the ID number of the car , change it to your own car ID number. That's it for now !

If you want and know what you are doing you can edit the whole carp.txt  file so you can change the performance of the car as you like. Keep in Mind that a car that goes more than 800 Km/h is fun but no one  would be able to drive it Normally around the tracks, so keep it as real as possible. Also a GOOD Sports Car tends to have Oversteering, so try to keep that in mind as well. When you start editing do 1 or 2 things at a time or you get lost in all the data. Test it around the track and try again or not. But changing the performance is not neccessary to use the car in NFS3. So you normally first get the car to look right and work o.k. and than you start changing the performance.

Editing the readme.txt file .....

This one is not IMPORTANT , because the game would run just the same without it, but .......... here you can put all the things relevant for your car. Of course you can use a template of another car and edit it all the way. Info about version updates , name of the author, used programs, email adress, and the permission section. So check it out and edit it so everyone knows for example what bugs are known , or if you allow your car on different sites or mediums. Just take your time and make it your style.

Putting all the pieces back together.....

Here we go than for the last part before Victory.   Use the VIV editor again , but now we are going to build the seperate files together again to become the NEW car.viv file (we are going to overwrite it so if you want, make a backup copy somewhere) When everything goes well you should now have your own homemade car.viv file in the mine directory. So it should be working now !

Starting  up Need For Speed 3......

Now it is time to start up the Need For Speed 3 game, when on the Car Player screen, select your car and view it around , it is now time to kick some ass around the tracks . But before you do so................

We are going to make a screenshot of your NEW car, to include it with your Zip file when you send it around the globe, also including the car.viv file (only that one not the smaller files , they are all included in the car.viv) and of course the readme.txt. So the keys are ALT and 'P' so when your car is in a good position press both keys and a screenshot is dumped on your desktop. Edit it later with a paintprogram to JPEG format and save it in your mine dir. Now your ready with editing so your are off to go RACING.

So select a track and at first the best is no opponents or traffic, and now test drive your car . When you need to make a change to the performance , just quit NFS3 , edit the carp.txt and use VIV editor to put the carp.txt together again with the other ones in the car.viv file . Than again start NFS3 and test drive it again and again and again and again.!

- That should do it  -

If all went right you should be able to drive your car around the tracks now, send it to your friends and race against them. The only thing left to say is that it could easily take a lot of days finetuning the textures (especially on full textured cars) and tuning the performance. Remember, that if your car got the HOT looks, but it is not drivable, people will never drive it again, so keep up the GOOD work and make Need For Speed 3 a long lasting game, with LOADS of great looking and great driving cars.

I hope this site is useful, and helps a lot of people , I did made it because I got a lot of email asking things, about how to , or why or whatever the question was. Hopefully this page will confince more people to try to make a NEW car for NFS3. If you have any questions or so please feel free to ask, but to let you know at the beginning of Oktober I did not even knew it was possible to create your own car. So Hang in and be patience also when a lot of things go wrong , because you are never the only one that had that kind of problems.

Finally I like to thank a few people that did help me out when I started to make cars, first of all KKMS for great support, and good time saving HINTS, Eric Arroyo also for some good problem solving and everyone that helped me out. With bug-findings or questions, with complaints and (a whole lot ) of compliments.  

THANKS EVERYBODY.

Enjoy the cars ,enjoy the game

Patrick Wisselo