Post by Nuppiz on Apr 9, 2020 0:28:19 GMT 2
Editor's note, 27th January 2015: This is the guide I wrote for GPM2 editing way back in 2009. I've decided to repost it here to keep it safe in case GPM2World goes down, with appendixes for the latest discoveries.
Editor's note, 9th April 2020: After GPRaceGames went down, this was fortunately enough salvaged by Sean. I've gone through the guide again and updated a few things.
Part 1: The beginning
1. Download the Starfire Editor, GPM2 Special Palettes, and an advanced picture editor program like Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop or GIMP if you haven't already got one. If you are using GIMP, you need the special GIMP Palette. Also get the Menu Templates to make the menu image editing process much faster and easier. Irfanview is also adequate enough for driver face pics, but it doesn't do a good enough job with any of the bigger pics. It's still a very good choice for browsing and resizing pictures, I use it all the time for that! As obvious as it is, this step is needed to do only once, when beginning to make your first mod.
2. Decide what series and what year your mod is going to be. Start gathering pictures and data for your mod. For pictures, you can make a folder called "F1" (or whatever series you're going to mod) and a subfolder named by the year you're going to mod, e.g. "2009", it's necessary if you're planning to make multiple mods about the same series and/or have pictures that do not align under a certain year or can be used in multiple different years. You should also make a subfolder for car side views, "matchbox" views and team/engine logos. For driver pics it's useful to make a subfolder solely for those JPGs, and yet another subfolder in the driver folder for the BMPs (helps a lot in Part 3)! For data, you can just look at the Internet when you need, or, if you're unsure about your Internet connection, make a text file out of different bits and pieces of data so you can get to it whenever you need.
Useful links (mainly F1)
Wikipedia: for some in-race pics, but mainly for data: drivers, teams, schedule, results, engines, to some extent designers/other personnel etc.
F1-Facts: for pictures, mainly in-race pics, contains pics from all of the seasons 1950-2007. Currently very buggy and not working properly at all.
Motorsport.com: for all sorts of pictures, including races, in pits, testing, presentations etc. Note that the pics are watermarked, so you'll have to crop the images a bit.
Speed Racing: for pics: "Fotos Raras" (as the name suggests, rare pics) and "Curiosidades" (biographies and histories) should be the places to go. As a special feature of this site, Curiosidades includes probably the best collection of F1 car side views, under the section "Carros Da Formula 1". Although it contains a lot of text as well, everything is in Portuguese, making the use of this site for information pretty limited unless you happen to know Portuguese, Spanish or any other similar language or trust whatever Google Translate throws at you.
Stats F1: for pics (see below on how to obtain them) and data. This site is very useful for obtaining information about the designers/engineers for all of the cars and the names of different suppliers for each team. It's also very handy for obtaining driver statistics, as it's very easy to see, for example, how many starts or points finishes any driver had at a certain point of their career. Unfortunately this site suffers a bit from the same problem as Speed Racing; most of the texts are in French, but luckily you can either conclude what the words mean on your own or use Google Translate, which works much better with French than Portuguese.
The Cahier Archive: a good archive of sharp and good-enough resolution F1 pictures starting from the 1960s.
Asag.sk: some driver photos, often from their pre-F1 careers.
Forix's 6th Gear: for various data, this link in particular points to an article detailing the main designers of all F1 cars.
ChicaneF1: various data, including designers and sponsors.
Cr-images.de: photos from various events, including F1 races from 1986 onwards.
Grandprix.com People Archive: lots of info on various motorsport personnel, mainly F1. Hasn't been properly updated since the mid-00s though.
F1 Nostalgia: high-resolution F1 photos.
F1 Fansite Wallpapers: high-resolution F1 photos.
F1-History at DeviantArt: high-resolution F1 photos.
Formula 1 High Res photos Facebook page.
4mula1stats.com individual stats for every driver from every season.
Egmond Images: high-res F1 photos.
Carlosghys.be: driver photos.
IntoF1: F1 photos and some stats.
F1-pics: high-resolution F1 photos.
Getty Images: plenty of photos; especially useful for driver pictures (use the "Embed" function to get a decent-resolution preview).
Motorsport Images: much like Getty Images, but with higher security measures. Getting photos from here is a bit tricky to say the least.
Google: when all else fails, there's always Google. Seriously, this can help you find a pic of that elusive driver or some pictures you couldn't find anywhere else. I'll have to use this approximately 10-60 (!) times per mod. Remember that the ones who are persistent reap the rewards, so don't give up if the pic you are looking for isn't among the first results.
The trick on how to get some pictures that you normally can't (right mouse-click controls disabled) is the magical Print Screen button on your keyboard. Capture the screen with Print Screen, go to an image editing program, paste and then crop all of the extra stuff out. Just make sure that your mouse cursor isn't on the way. Really, it's that simple. Although this might be against the rules, sometimes you just don't have any alternatives. If Print Screen doesn't work for some reason (some sites have protection in place to prevent it being used), try Irfanview's "Capture" function.
HINT: Even a small image can be turned into one of proper size with only a little distortion (which, in turn, vanishes almost completely when applying the palette) when applying the Lanczos filter with Irfanview. For example, a 400×265 image may very well make it to a menu picture (which is 640x480 or 640x461, respectively). So even if the picture appears to be too small for the purpose but it's the only alternative you've got, try to resize it with Lanczos before dumping it. You might just be surprised by the power of the resampling.
REMEMBER: THIS IS NOT A JOB! If you get tired at some part of the modding process, take a break! No-one is forcing any deadlines on you (apart from yourself, if you're such a person), so don't try to push through the process if you're too tired or busy with other things. This is a free-time hobby, not a job!
Part 2: Driver Images
NOTE#1: All of the menus I use here are also accessible by mouse, but I use the keyboard shortcuts as they save quite a bit of time.
1. Having used whatever sources you have to obtain the driver pictures (there's 64 drivers with pics in total), it's time to start editing them to GPM2 format. Remember, you can use your mouse scroll to scroll through images in that folder if using Irfanview (just open an image in the folder you'll want to scroll through; this is why I advised you to make so many subfolders in Part 1 so that you can easily scroll through different types of images), but only those that were in the folder when you started Irfanview. So if you added new pictures in the folder you're scrolling through after starting Irfanview, you'll have to restart the program in order for them to be viewable by the mouse scroll. You can still open the new pics manually, but it won't fix the scrolling thing, so it's best advised to get all the pics you need before starting editing.
2. It's time to start cropping. The aspect ratio for a news picture is 0.731 and the size is 256x350, so we want to get as near as possible to that, right? Press Ctrl+A to select the whole image, and then grab a hold of the edge of the image. Start to move the cursor, and the aspect ratio (the last number in the top bar) should change. Once you'll get close enough or exactly to 0.731, it's time to resize the image according to what it shall be in GPM2.
3. There's a variety of methods in doing this:
NOTE#2: Before using these methods, it is suggested that you set up your Irfanview Resize settings manually to the best possible result. To do this, open the Resize box with any image open and select Resample (better quality) and Lanczos filter (slowest) from the drop menu next to it (don't worry, it's not actually that slow, I haven't found any difference in terms of speed between using Lanczos and not using any resampling at all even on older computers). Then click OK, and your setup is now saved.
Method 1: Press Ctrl+C to copy the selected part of the image, then press Shift+N to open the "Create new image" box. To save time, set image width to 256 and height to 350 (leave the other settings untouched) and press OK. Then press Ctrl+A on the new blank image (the one you just created) and then Ctrl+V and ta-dah, you have a properly-sized image!
Method 2: Instead of pressing Ctrl+C like above, press Ctrl+X. The part of the image that you had selected should "vanish" (onto your PC's clipboard actually). Now press Ctrl+V to bring the piece of the image you just cut back to the screen. Then press Ctrl+R to bring up the resizing box and type the aforementioned dimensions in "width" and "height". If you tick "preserve aspect ratio", the program will automatically calculate the other dimension for you when you type the other, however, the selected image's aspect ratio must be exactly right for this to work properly. Click "OK" and you have a ready picture.
Method 3: Open a ready news pic in another Irfanview window, and then press Ctrl+C on the picture you're editing. Get back to the ready news picture, and press Ctrl+A and Ctrl+V. You should have the picture you're editing correctly resized. This is a very fast method and it's the one I personally use.
Whichever method you chose, you now have to apply the special palette for the pictures. Alternatively, you can also save (and I highly recommend you to do so) the now correctly sized picture as a JPG or PNG so you have a full-color backup.
NOTE#3: You can skip step 4 (but still do step 5, of course) and do it along with editing drivers in part 3; there you can kill two birds with one stone.
Also, if using PSP/Photoshop, you must set up the palette paths. In PSP (at least up to version 9, though I’m using PSP8) go to Image->Palette->Load Palette (or just press Shift+O), then go to Edit paths“, select Browse and go to the folder where the palette is. Or just move the palette to the “Palettes” folder of the PSP directory. Photoshop is pretty much the same, only that the names are different: Image->Mode->Color Table. In GIMP, go to Image-Mode-Indexed (don't worry, the GIMP Palette download comes with a more detailed guide).
4. In Irfanview, go to Image->Palette->Load palette and find the palette from the folder you unzipped it in. Alternatively, you can copy the palette to the folder you are going to save this image in for future use. Double click the palette file and it's applied on the image. Beware though, the quality is not good and therefore I suggest another, more advanced image editing program for applying the palette with "error diffusion dithering" - much better quality! Just copy-paste the correctly sized image to PSP, Photoshop or GIMP and select error diffusion dithering when applying palette. Whatever method you use, save the image in PCX format (remember NOT to delete the JPG or PNG backup).
5. The smaller driver pics are pretty much the same thing, but their size is 64x64 and aspect ratio is 1.000, respectively. Resize with any of the methods above (except method 3 as there's no ready driver pics, although after making one 64x64 image you can use it as a base for others), but if you have access to "error diffusion dithering", I suggest that you manually resize the images, applying Hermite filter on them instead of Lanczos (copy-paste resizing won't work as it seems to automatically use Lanczos), as the images look a bit less blurrier with that. Apply the palette like with news pics, but instead save it in BMP format (preferably in the BMP folder I told you to create in Part 1, it helps in Part 3).
Part 3: The Starfire Editor
The Starfire Editor is the ultimate tool of GPM2 editing. Even if all the graphics work feels like a huge task, all of it would be of little use without this. Before the release of Dj_ByteDisaster's EDY Viewer/Converter it was the only way to access any of the edy files floating around the game folder, and it's still a much more comfortable way (sorry ByteDisaster ) to edit the few, yet essential EDYs it can (namely driver faces, sponsor images, team logos, engine logos, car side views and the tiny in-race cars). It's also the only tool that can conveniently edit engine HP, weight and home country, sponsor names and, perhaps most importantly, all of the drivers that aren't aligned to a certain team (and make them to be a part of a certain team at the start of the game, of course, though they'll have no contracts; I'll talk about that soon).
1. If you already have a config file (.gcf), skip this part, you can just rename the existing config. Remember though that the DEFAULTS.GCF which is supplied with the original game is buggy, so DON'T use it in any case.
Go to GPM2, click Long term contract, pick any difficulty and team, press 'OK' in the bottom right corner at the next screen, and click save settings. Save the config with any name you want (but preferably the year your mod is going to be about), and exit GPM2.
2. Open Starfire Editor, and configure it by selecting Tools->Options. Select the GPM2.exe in the folder you want to edit (remember that the folder has to have all of the GPM2 files to work, like any of the mods here or the original game). Note that only 1.02 exes work with the Starfire Editor; 1.02B exes won’t load up. If you want to use a 1.02B exe you have to do all of the exe-related edits in a hex editor (a link to the hex-editing guide can be found in Part 5). Select the icon with an arrow pointing to a document, and look for the config you just saved. Open it, and you should get different teams and drivers appear in the editor. Alternatively, if there's already a carset file (.gcd) around, you can go to File->Open and open that file. It should get you the same data that importing from a config file would do (assuming that they're of the same version, of course; all of the mods here contain both a carset file and a config file that have identical information).
NOTE: all of the following steps can be done in any order you want; this is just the order I'm usually doing this.
3. Now you can start editing teams, engines and drivers. I prefer to start with teams. Click on any of the names, and a Team Editor box should appear. Team name and manager can be edited straight there; all of the other data can be edited from either a drop menu, which allows you to select another choice from the existing ones, or by double clicking, which allows you to edit those choices; skill and names for personnel, HP, weight, logo and country for engines and the home track of every team (the editor uses the default track names, so if you're using custom tracks you have to memorise which tracks have been replaced). The personnel and engine edit menus can also be found in the top menu.
Logo editing is similar to all of the graphic editing done via the Starfire Editor, just find your readily-made file and import it to the Editor (you can make the logos at the same time when editing the team data, but the instructions for that are in part 4). For the best balance, look at that year's final standings and put the teams in the same order. If there's more than 13 teams in the season you're editing, then select the 13 best teams based on points, race positions and historical value; if there's less than 13 teams, try to find extra teams like abandoned projects or teams that were around in the previous season(s) or joined F1 in the near future. For personnel: best ones for the top teams, then gradually lower the ratings when going lower in the rankings.
4. Engines can be edited either by double clicking on them in the team menu or from Edit->Engines in the top menu. Engine Quality equals reliability, while the HP and weight figures can be found on the internet in most cases. Sometimes the real-life figures might cause unrealistic team performance; in this case, make edits until you find a good balance.
Here's the minimum and maximum values of the engines:
Max Engine Power: 835 hp
Min Engine Power: 0 hp
Max Engine Weight: 500 kg
Min Engine Weight: 0 kg
It should be noted that very low power and weight figures can lead to glitches, so it's best to avoid power figures under 500 hp and weight figures under 100 kg.
5. To edit drivers, click the driver you're going to edit, and select "Edit Driver". Here you can edit all sorts of data about the driver, including his name, age, nationality, salary, bonuses, statistics and skills (see the Appendix below to know what different skills mean). You should note that drivers will only go to the Rookie Pool if they have both 0 races started and one star in Experience. Use the sites mentioned in Part 1 or any other sources to fill these stats. There should also be a "Modify Picture" button. Click that, and find the BMP file you previously saved in Part 2; it helps if you saved all the driver face BMPs in a separate folder: the editor can remember the folder you are using so it automatically opens when editing the next driver. You can also find a driver pic by typing the first few letters of the filename, after which the editor fills in the rest of the name. Double click on it or select "Open". The image should now appear in the driver's profile. During this step, you can also make the news pics: if you've already saved them, then rename them according to each drivers DF code and move them to the NEWS-subfolder of the mod folder. If you haven't yet done the PCXs (but have resized the JPGS that are of proper size), you can now copy-paste each driver image to Photoshop or PSP, apply the palette and save them straight to the NEWS-folder (again, according to that driver's DF code).
NOTE: only the following drivers have 16/16 contracts at the start of the game; you can see each driver's DF code by opening his profile and looking at the very bottom of that window (This Driver has portrait picture file DFXX.PCX). The drivers that have contracts are: DF0, DF1, DF2, DF3, DF4, DF5, DF7, DF8, DF9, DF11, DF12, DF13, DF15, DF16, DF19, DF20, DF21, DF22, DF23, DF24, DF25, DF27, DF28, DF29, DF30, DF31, DF39, DF40, DF41, DF42, DF46 and DF47 (32 in total; exactly half of the drivers that have pics). In addition DF26 and DF45 have 0/16 contracts.
6. You can edit the external suppliers (fuel, tyres, spare parts, security) by selecting Edit->External Suppliers. Just put in the names you want in these boxes, but remember the letter limit on the right side of these boxes; you can’t write longer names than the limit is. You can also edit the sponsor names by selecting Edit->Sponsors and their logos by selecting Pictures->Sponsor Logos. Editing sponsor logos is pretty straightforward, export the base pictures (right-click on them to bring up the menu) to serve as guidelines, then edit the logo you want on top of the existing ones with the image editing program of your choice, apply palette, save as BMP and import the new ones to the editor (again with right-clicking on the icons). Remember that the bright green (RGB value 0, 255, 0) parts of these images is transparent (i.e. doesn’t appear) in the game itself.
After you've done everything you want (or just want to quit editing for now), save the mod. The Starfire Editor saves all the data (statistics, names, all the pics that are editable with this editor) as a handy backup in case you mess up your config file with the ingame editor or accidentally export wrong data to it from another .gcd file. When it reads "noname.gcd" in the top bar, both of the save icons (the diskettes) open the save box which prompts you to name your new carset (.gcd) file. If it reads something else, then you have either opened a .gcd file or have saved already, which means that you have two options: the icon with just the diskette saves the file with the current filename and overwrites previous data in the file, whereas the icon with a diskette and some dots below it allows you to save the .gcd with a different filename (and keep the older .gcd untouched). Then export the data to GPM2 by choosing File->Export or the icon with an arrow going out from a document, and choose the config file you want to edit (double-click on the file or click Open). You should get a box saying "Carset Exported successfully". The editor has now overwritten all of the .edy files that are editable with the BMPs you imported (they are converted to the edy format, of course), overwrites the engine data in the exe and exports the rest of the data to the config file so you can get the correct data in GPM2 (as GPM2 can't read .gcd because it's a third-party format).
Whenever you return to modding, you can go to File->Reopen to quickly open the .gcd again (or any of the last ten gcd you have opened lately). NOTE: the editor DOES NOT prompt you to save the .gcd if you close the editor with the "X" button, so make sure you save before exiting!
Open GPM2, load your config (see the How to load configs guide, also readable at GPM2World, if you don't know how to open them properly) and look at the drivers you edited. If the pics appear only as black or white squares, you have forgot to apply the palette on the pics in Part 2 (you can see the same thing in the Editor also by exiting the driver profile and opening it again). If they appear as you saw them in the editor, you have just edited your first driver faces! Well done!
If you want to switch between different projects, you have two things to do. First go to File->Close. The editor asks if you want to save if you haven't saved the recent changes. Then go to Tools->Options and reconfigure your exe to the folder you're going to edit next. NOTE: If you're just looking at different .gcd (and perhaps exporting pics such as car side views and matchbox views), there's no need to change the exe. Only when exporting data to a config you must have the correct exe chosen.
APPENDIX - Driver Skills
You may sometimes wonder what all those different driver skills mean. Here's a quick introduction to them that is taken from the official manual (thanks to Steve V for that!) and edited a bit, apart from Motivation, which is not listed in the manual but explained here nonetheless. Take note that "Basic Speed" in the editor is named "Quickness" in-game (hence the "Qu" abbreviation).
Quickness: Used when deciding how fast the driver is capable of driving.
Experience: This will help prevent the driver messing up at the start and how they handle tricky situations - such as when they’re being blocked.
Overtaking: Overtaking is hard enough in Formula One, so if you’ve got a good car you want someone who can slice through the field.
Luck: Used to see what happens when a car goes out (in other words, how easily and how serious injuries the driver may suffer). Also affects the chance of a mechanical failure a little bit.
Stamina: Comes into play at the latter stages of a race. A low stamina increases the chance that the driver makes a big mistake then.
Wet Weather: Good drivers in here get a performance boost when raining, while low-skilled drivers in this category may suffer from wet weather.
Character: Used mostly in contract negotiations, strong characters are generally harder to negotiate with.
Reliability: Can you depend on the driver that he/she will do as he is told to do without losing concentration (and spinning off/crashing).
Intelligence: Used with Experience when the driver must handle tricky situations. Also affects how well the driver can improve his/her skills.
Ambition: Used in negotiations and deciding whether to modify motivation - ambitious people want to win, else they want to leave.
Leadership: Helps train the two lower drivers (driver two and test driver).
Motivation: Affects the drivers speed and reliability as well as negotiations; low motivation drivers are generally slower, less reliable and tougher to negotiate than their well-motivated counterparts with the same other skills.
Part 4: Team and engine logos, menu and news pictures
So, you've edited all the team and driver data, and now think that most of the work is now done. But you’re wrong, only about half of the work has been done at this point!
In the previous part of this guide I briefly mentioned team and engine logos. So here's the full guide:
1. Team logos have the size of 32x32 and engine logos are 16x16, respectively. The following part applies for both of them, only the size is different.
2. After finding a suitable picture for the logo, copy-paste it in Paint (oh yes, THAT Paint, you didn’t misread it!). The reason we’re using Paint here is that it has two good features: instant cropping (just grab a hold of the edge of the image and start moving your mouse, make sure you don‘t have anything selected though) and easy select-move controls (select a part of the image, hold it with the left mouse button and move your mouse). Once you’ve got that picture loaded up in Paint, start cropping. Yet you can only crop from the right and down of the image, so you’ll have to do this to get the other edges as well: press Ctrl+A to select the image as a whole, then move the image so the left- and topsides are also cropped to the point you want them to be. Then just crop the extra white space on the right and down of the image. The object is to get the image to be as square as possible. However, this is very often not the case with team logos, even after cropping all of the "extra" off from the image; most often you’ll end up in an image that has a lot more width than height. Just increasing the height would result in a logo with very small text. Luckily there’s a couple of ways to help make the picture squarer:
Method 1: If the image has a lot of text or other stuff, you can select a part of the image and move it under/on top of the text, depending on which part of the image you chose (remember to extend the pic’s height first). Then just crop the extra width and fill the extended part with the correct background color.
Method 2: If the team has a distinctive logo, use only that instead of the logo and the text. Alternatively, you can just take the first letter of their name and use that as a logo.
When you’ve got the logo ready, import it to another program (Irfanview can do just fine here), resize it to the correct size, apply the palette and save the logo as BMP.
Now, it's time to do the 'big thing' as I like to call it: the menu images. For these I recommend the '3+1' method, which means three Irfanview windows plus PSP/Photoshop opened, making things a lot quicker.
NOTE: the next part is easy if you associated the PCX and JPG files with Irfanview during its installation: just double-click a file and it opens in Irfanview.
3. Open any picture from the folder you saved all the pics (the main folder; you had different subfolders for drivers and logos, right?) in Irfanview, then open a menu picture from the main folder of the mod (those .PCXs floating around) in another Irfanview window, then open a third window from the mod’s main folder also. So in the first window you can now scroll through all of the files you saved, but only if they’re not too big for your screen (the program just scrolls that image instead of changing them), which means that you’ll either have to zoom out with the minus button as a temporary solution (has to be repeated every time you encounter this image) OR as a permanent solution resize them to be a bit smaller so they’ll fit your screen (GPM2 pics are only 640x480 at largest so it has no detrimental effects). In the other two windows you can scroll through the PCX, text and audio files of the main folder. But why two, you’ll ask? Because it helps in the editing process a lot.
4. Scroll to the first image of the mod’s folder in both of these windows. Now, observe what is happening in that picture and what the image name is (if you have played the game a bit, you’ll most likely know where it appears). Once you get the hang of these you can just go editing straight away when making your next mod. Select the whole image by pressing Ctrl+A. You’ll now see the size and aspect ratio for that image. The most common sizes are: 640x480 (1.333), 640x461 (1.388) and 640x460 (1.391).
Now, go to the window that hosts your basic images, pick a suitable image and select a part of it that closely matches the menu picture in terms of aspect ratio. Get to the first Irfanview window (the one that has the whole image selected) and paste. Now, you’ve got a base for a new menu pic. If the menu image has any "transparent" sections (the area that is under the text in-game; blue-grayish in the original game, usually dark in the mods), you can just use my handy menu templates to apply these on the resized base image. To do this, open a menu template in the advanced edting program of your choice, paste the resized base image as a new layer, move it behind the template layer, apply the palette and save as PCX. Then just rinse and repeat the same process with all the other menu images (excluding the ones I've listed as unneeded; see below)!
5. Some of the pictures are not actually included in the game; they’re just leftovers from GPM1 and stuff that was cut from the final game. Obviously, these don’t have to be edited for the mod. These are: END.PCX, FIAPANEL.PCX, PITBOARD.PCX, STAFFLIX.PCX, TD_WINP2.PCX, TD_WINPT.PCX, TESTINT.PCX (even if it seems to be a normal GPM2 menu image), TVTEST.PCX, TVTEST2.PCX.
6. Additionally, some of the pics appear ingame, but don’t have to be necessarily edited to make a good mod. I’ve marked all of the pics that you can somewhat easily edit if you want to with "edit for better looks" and those that aren‘t usually edited because of being too laborious to edit are marked with "laborious to edit"; just leave the others to be.
BANK.PCX (bank screen, edit if you want better looks), BENCH2.PCX (driver aid setup, laborious to edit because of the icons) CAREXT.PCX (car externals, laborious to edit), CARINT.PCX (car internals, laborious to edit), CARSETUP.PCX (car setup, laborious to edit), CFGMAIN.PCX (appears when you configure the main screen, and is covered with buttons, so it‘s hard to spot any difference even if edited), DUMGAME.PCX (purpose unknown; leave it be), DUMRACE.PCX (same as previous), EDCOM.PCX (one of the title screens, just leave it be, this firm deserves credit from this game!), FIALOGO.PCX (shown at the end of the season, edit if you have to change the FIA logo), GROUND.PCX (purpose unknown; leave it be), INTROPIC.PCX (same as previous), MPLOGO.PCX (another title screen, the game's original distributor, just leave it be), MTCSTRI2 and MTCSTRIP.PCX (the top bars of the game screen), NEWS and NEWS2.PCX (the base images for news), OPT13.PCX (e-mail screen, edit if you want better looks), OUTRACE.PCX (purpose unknown; leave it be), PROFLOSS (profit & loss screen, edit for better looks), RACEPAN.PCX (used in race), SECURITY.PCX (security contract screen, edit for better looks), SHELVES.PCX (used when changing parts, leave it be), SITE.PCX (team facilities build screen; if you want to edit it, leave the hand-drawn area as it is), SPNSRS.PCX, SPONCONT.PCX and SPONDEAL.PCX (sponsor screens, no need to edit and the SPONDEAL.PCX is not that easy to edit), TEAMSITE.PCX (circuit screen, a bit laborious to edit because of the track icons, only edit if you have changed the tracks), TOYSHOP.PCX (merchandise screen, laborious to edit because of the product icons), TV_SET.PCX (the TV screen during races if you watch them in top down view), TVCOVER.PCX (covered in text ingame, not necessary to edit), TVSTUDIO.PCX (very laborious to edit), TVTESTNO.PCX (shown for a tiny moment when going to TV mode in races), WEAT1-WEAT5.PCX (weather pictures on the TV screen during races if you watch them in top down view) and WEATPIC1-WEATPIC5 (same as previous, only for TV Mode; the ideal place for these would actually be the TVS folder rather than the main one, but for some reason they are stored here instead), WIND and WIND2.PCX (wind tunnel pics, hard to edit).
7. So, there was the menu pics, and the next step is going to be a cakewalk when compared to that. Now, we're going for the news pics; you made a part of these when making the driver news pics, so let’s do the rest of them now. There's only a couple of things to mention, as most of this is just resizing & applying palette (and the observation part if you're making your first mod). There's two types of news image: the flat ones (590x180, 3.278) and the tall ones (256x350, 0.731, familiar from the driver pics). There's also a few images that do not appear ingame, being leftovers from GPM1. These are: CONCERN.PCX, MAN1.PCX, MAN2.PCX, PARTY1.PCX, and WELCOME.PCX. Also, the one with the security camera doesn't have to necessarily be replaced, since it's a "timeless" image. The other thing to note is that some images are controlled by the "base order" of the teams. By base order, I mean the order that you'll see them in the editor, not in game (since you can alter the order of the teams with the game's own editor too). In essence: if you put Williams to be the first team in the editor, then the Williams team uses the 13A, 13AA etc. pictures in the news, and the next team 13B etc. pics, and so on. They will use these images no matter what you change the order to be with the ingame editor.
Part 5: Finishing touches, advanced config editing, hex editing, string editing, EDY editing and track editing
Okay, the majority of the work is now done, and there's not that much to do anymore before you can release your mod (unless you want to use the mod in a 1.02B EXE, in which case there's still a lot of hex editing to do). In this part we handle the car side views, matchbox views, car numbers, starting year and top downs, with references to the advanced config editing, hex editing, EDY editing and track editing guides.
1. You may have noticed that I've referred to the car side views and “matchbox” views a few times in the earlier parts of this guide, but only now I'll tell you how to make them.
First, open the Starfire Editor and the project you are working on. Then go to Pictures ->Cars and select any of the teams. This is the screen where you can edit the aforementioned pictures. Export one to get a reference, but if you like, you don't have to export the side view since I‘ll tell you about them soon enough, just export a matchbox view to serve as a base for editing.
Second, open a ready side view image (downloaded from Speed Racing, for example). Use the "Move and crop" method in Paint to get rid of the extra space. Then, copy-paste this side view to Irfanview (other programs work as well, but I've found this one to be the easiest to use). Start painting the white edges of the image with bright green (RGB value 0, 255, 0). Zoom in to be more accurate with this. Painting the white edges green allows that only the part of the image that has some other colors on it (i.e. the car itself) will appear.
NOTE: If you're using the flood fill/paint bucket tool (which is highly recommended) and the car has white and/or very light-coloured parts near the edges of the car, make sure that you outline these parts (with the transparent green, for example) so that they don't get painted as well.
2. When finished with the painting process, resize the image 128x30. I suggest using Hermite filter instead of Lanczos when using Irfanview. Also, most of the time the aspect ratio isn't correct enough for the "Preserve aspect ratio" option to work properly, so tick it off and type both of the dimensions manually. After resizing, zoom in again and look for any "dirty green" on the edges of the car (slightly darker or brighter shades of green; if you don't remove those the car has very dodgy edges in-game). After that's done, apply the palette and check for any "dirty green" again, just in case. When finished, save the image as BMP and import it to the Starfire Editor from Pictures-> Cars.
3. The "matchbox" cars are a bit trickier. These are the cars you see going around the track when watching them from the top down view. Luckily, they're not so accurate on detail (how could a car that's 6 pixels in size?), so most of the time you can import them from other mods or have to edit them only a little. To do this, open another gcd file (in another Starfire Editor window, I prefer), open Pictures->Cars, select the team you want, click "Export" below the "Matchbox View" text, and name it what you like. Then, if the matchbox view is already suitable enough for your mod, just apply the palette (Starfire Editor exports the images in 24-bit BMP format, which is unsuitable for GPM2), save and import it to your project. If it isn't, then you have to edit them. First apply the palette on the image (to make sure you won't be using any wrong colours). Then, try to observe the main parts of the car livery you're making and start painting those little cars accordingly (zoom in as much as you want). Save as BMP and import to the editor like the side views.
4. Whenever you are finished, you have to export the new images to GPM2. This happens at the same time when exporting data to the config file; the editor converts all the images you have edited to the edy format and overwrites the existing ones.
5. The car numbers can be edited only through the ingame editor. To do this, open your config file normally, but at the point where you would re-select your team choose "Drivers" instead. Now, you can edit their car numbers by simply clicking on the driver and typing a new number to the "Car number:" box below the first row of his/her skills. The only thing you should note that you cannot swap numbers: for example, if Schumacher has number 1 and Alonso number 3, you cannot type "1" in Alonso's box, you'll just get a message saying that "Please change the number because it is already being used by Michael Schumacher". You'll also risk running into a serious bug; see below for a workaround. Instead, you'll have to change Schumi's number to be like "99", and only then you can change Alonso's number to be 1.
KNOWN BUG: If you happen to change a driver's number to the same that someone else is using, you'll trigger a small bug. In essence, the game exits the current driver's editing screen and returns to the main driver screen, but actually the editing window is still running on the background. If you click on any of the drivers when this bug is active, you'll see some stars appear on the screen where they shouldn't appear, but nothing else changes. Clicking on any of the drivers again will cause the second driver of the 4th team to be deleted. In this case, the only option is to reload the config. Luckily, there's a workaround. Instead of attempting to re-edit the driver you were just editing when the window prompting you to change the driver's number appeared, just click on the “OK” button in the bottom-right corner. Nothing seems to happen, but it actually clears the editing window from running hidden on the background. Now you can edit normally again.
6. The car top downs are a tricky part. These are the ones that appear in the sponsor negotiation, driver setup and after-race screens. They are also controlled by the "base value" (remember from the news pics?); CAROVR0 is for the first team, CAROVR1 for the second and so on. As always the car's background must be transparent, but now you have alternatives: either the familiar bright green (0, 255, 0), a darker green (0, 127, 0) or a special grey (111, 107, 107). The latter two colours work only on the car top downs, while the first one is used everywhere else but works fine with these, too. I can't tell much about the drawing process itself, I've never been good at it and usually resorted to other members of the community.
7. There are a number of ways with which you can enhance the mod beyond what conventional editing methods can do. You can hex edit both the config file and EXE to change features that are normally not editable. You can also edit all EDY files, even those not accessible with the Starfire Editor, with DjByteDisaster's EDY Viewer/Converter. With Resource hacker, you can change all text strings in the game, even up to a point that allows for fan translations. Finally, you can even make custom tracks with Kroah's Track Editor.
Since there are so many variables to edit it's easier to just post links to detailed guides to each feature:
Backmarker's config editing guide
EXE Hex Editing Guide (only for 1.02B EXEs)
EDY Viewer/Converter Guide
Resource Hacker text string guide
Kroah's Track Editor (guide included in the download)
8. Finally, you've got your mod finished. Now it's just checking that everything is correct and in place, and that you haven't forgot to put a palette on any of the pictures. After this, you can release your mod! Congratulate yourself on a job well done. Upload it on a file sharing website so others can access it (MediaFire is my personal favorite, but there are other good ones as well). Post about it on the GPRaceGames forums (preferably in the "Mods" section). Contact Sionco if you think your mod is so good that it could be uploaded on this site. Move on to a next project, if you're ambitious and have the itch to mod some more. Maybe someday you'll be more popular than yours truly! Or just take a break for now and relax, let modding rest for a while. Whatever you do, you have just contributed for the community and helped keep this wonderful game alive!
See ya!
Editor's note, 9th April 2020: After GPRaceGames went down, this was fortunately enough salvaged by Sean. I've gone through the guide again and updated a few things.
Part 1: The beginning
1. Download the Starfire Editor, GPM2 Special Palettes, and an advanced picture editor program like Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop or GIMP if you haven't already got one. If you are using GIMP, you need the special GIMP Palette. Also get the Menu Templates to make the menu image editing process much faster and easier. Irfanview is also adequate enough for driver face pics, but it doesn't do a good enough job with any of the bigger pics. It's still a very good choice for browsing and resizing pictures, I use it all the time for that! As obvious as it is, this step is needed to do only once, when beginning to make your first mod.
2. Decide what series and what year your mod is going to be. Start gathering pictures and data for your mod. For pictures, you can make a folder called "F1" (or whatever series you're going to mod) and a subfolder named by the year you're going to mod, e.g. "2009", it's necessary if you're planning to make multiple mods about the same series and/or have pictures that do not align under a certain year or can be used in multiple different years. You should also make a subfolder for car side views, "matchbox" views and team/engine logos. For driver pics it's useful to make a subfolder solely for those JPGs, and yet another subfolder in the driver folder for the BMPs (helps a lot in Part 3)! For data, you can just look at the Internet when you need, or, if you're unsure about your Internet connection, make a text file out of different bits and pieces of data so you can get to it whenever you need.
Useful links (mainly F1)
Wikipedia: for some in-race pics, but mainly for data: drivers, teams, schedule, results, engines, to some extent designers/other personnel etc.
F1-Facts: for pictures, mainly in-race pics, contains pics from all of the seasons 1950-2007. Currently very buggy and not working properly at all.
Motorsport.com: for all sorts of pictures, including races, in pits, testing, presentations etc. Note that the pics are watermarked, so you'll have to crop the images a bit.
Speed Racing: for pics: "Fotos Raras" (as the name suggests, rare pics) and "Curiosidades" (biographies and histories) should be the places to go. As a special feature of this site, Curiosidades includes probably the best collection of F1 car side views, under the section "Carros Da Formula 1". Although it contains a lot of text as well, everything is in Portuguese, making the use of this site for information pretty limited unless you happen to know Portuguese, Spanish or any other similar language or trust whatever Google Translate throws at you.
Stats F1: for pics (see below on how to obtain them) and data. This site is very useful for obtaining information about the designers/engineers for all of the cars and the names of different suppliers for each team. It's also very handy for obtaining driver statistics, as it's very easy to see, for example, how many starts or points finishes any driver had at a certain point of their career. Unfortunately this site suffers a bit from the same problem as Speed Racing; most of the texts are in French, but luckily you can either conclude what the words mean on your own or use Google Translate, which works much better with French than Portuguese.
The Cahier Archive: a good archive of sharp and good-enough resolution F1 pictures starting from the 1960s.
Asag.sk: some driver photos, often from their pre-F1 careers.
Forix's 6th Gear: for various data, this link in particular points to an article detailing the main designers of all F1 cars.
ChicaneF1: various data, including designers and sponsors.
Cr-images.de: photos from various events, including F1 races from 1986 onwards.
Grandprix.com People Archive: lots of info on various motorsport personnel, mainly F1. Hasn't been properly updated since the mid-00s though.
F1 Nostalgia: high-resolution F1 photos.
F1 Fansite Wallpapers: high-resolution F1 photos.
F1-History at DeviantArt: high-resolution F1 photos.
Formula 1 High Res photos Facebook page.
4mula1stats.com individual stats for every driver from every season.
Egmond Images: high-res F1 photos.
Carlosghys.be: driver photos.
IntoF1: F1 photos and some stats.
F1-pics: high-resolution F1 photos.
Getty Images: plenty of photos; especially useful for driver pictures (use the "Embed" function to get a decent-resolution preview).
Motorsport Images: much like Getty Images, but with higher security measures. Getting photos from here is a bit tricky to say the least.
Google: when all else fails, there's always Google. Seriously, this can help you find a pic of that elusive driver or some pictures you couldn't find anywhere else. I'll have to use this approximately 10-60 (!) times per mod. Remember that the ones who are persistent reap the rewards, so don't give up if the pic you are looking for isn't among the first results.
The trick on how to get some pictures that you normally can't (right mouse-click controls disabled) is the magical Print Screen button on your keyboard. Capture the screen with Print Screen, go to an image editing program, paste and then crop all of the extra stuff out. Just make sure that your mouse cursor isn't on the way. Really, it's that simple. Although this might be against the rules, sometimes you just don't have any alternatives. If Print Screen doesn't work for some reason (some sites have protection in place to prevent it being used), try Irfanview's "Capture" function.
HINT: Even a small image can be turned into one of proper size with only a little distortion (which, in turn, vanishes almost completely when applying the palette) when applying the Lanczos filter with Irfanview. For example, a 400×265 image may very well make it to a menu picture (which is 640x480 or 640x461, respectively). So even if the picture appears to be too small for the purpose but it's the only alternative you've got, try to resize it with Lanczos before dumping it. You might just be surprised by the power of the resampling.
REMEMBER: THIS IS NOT A JOB! If you get tired at some part of the modding process, take a break! No-one is forcing any deadlines on you (apart from yourself, if you're such a person), so don't try to push through the process if you're too tired or busy with other things. This is a free-time hobby, not a job!
Part 2: Driver Images
NOTE#1: All of the menus I use here are also accessible by mouse, but I use the keyboard shortcuts as they save quite a bit of time.
1. Having used whatever sources you have to obtain the driver pictures (there's 64 drivers with pics in total), it's time to start editing them to GPM2 format. Remember, you can use your mouse scroll to scroll through images in that folder if using Irfanview (just open an image in the folder you'll want to scroll through; this is why I advised you to make so many subfolders in Part 1 so that you can easily scroll through different types of images), but only those that were in the folder when you started Irfanview. So if you added new pictures in the folder you're scrolling through after starting Irfanview, you'll have to restart the program in order for them to be viewable by the mouse scroll. You can still open the new pics manually, but it won't fix the scrolling thing, so it's best advised to get all the pics you need before starting editing.
2. It's time to start cropping. The aspect ratio for a news picture is 0.731 and the size is 256x350, so we want to get as near as possible to that, right? Press Ctrl+A to select the whole image, and then grab a hold of the edge of the image. Start to move the cursor, and the aspect ratio (the last number in the top bar) should change. Once you'll get close enough or exactly to 0.731, it's time to resize the image according to what it shall be in GPM2.
3. There's a variety of methods in doing this:
NOTE#2: Before using these methods, it is suggested that you set up your Irfanview Resize settings manually to the best possible result. To do this, open the Resize box with any image open and select Resample (better quality) and Lanczos filter (slowest) from the drop menu next to it (don't worry, it's not actually that slow, I haven't found any difference in terms of speed between using Lanczos and not using any resampling at all even on older computers). Then click OK, and your setup is now saved.
Method 1: Press Ctrl+C to copy the selected part of the image, then press Shift+N to open the "Create new image" box. To save time, set image width to 256 and height to 350 (leave the other settings untouched) and press OK. Then press Ctrl+A on the new blank image (the one you just created) and then Ctrl+V and ta-dah, you have a properly-sized image!
Method 2: Instead of pressing Ctrl+C like above, press Ctrl+X. The part of the image that you had selected should "vanish" (onto your PC's clipboard actually). Now press Ctrl+V to bring the piece of the image you just cut back to the screen. Then press Ctrl+R to bring up the resizing box and type the aforementioned dimensions in "width" and "height". If you tick "preserve aspect ratio", the program will automatically calculate the other dimension for you when you type the other, however, the selected image's aspect ratio must be exactly right for this to work properly. Click "OK" and you have a ready picture.
Method 3: Open a ready news pic in another Irfanview window, and then press Ctrl+C on the picture you're editing. Get back to the ready news picture, and press Ctrl+A and Ctrl+V. You should have the picture you're editing correctly resized. This is a very fast method and it's the one I personally use.
Whichever method you chose, you now have to apply the special palette for the pictures. Alternatively, you can also save (and I highly recommend you to do so) the now correctly sized picture as a JPG or PNG so you have a full-color backup.
NOTE#3: You can skip step 4 (but still do step 5, of course) and do it along with editing drivers in part 3; there you can kill two birds with one stone.
Also, if using PSP/Photoshop, you must set up the palette paths. In PSP (at least up to version 9, though I’m using PSP8) go to Image->Palette->Load Palette (or just press Shift+O), then go to Edit paths“, select Browse and go to the folder where the palette is. Or just move the palette to the “Palettes” folder of the PSP directory. Photoshop is pretty much the same, only that the names are different: Image->Mode->Color Table. In GIMP, go to Image-Mode-Indexed (don't worry, the GIMP Palette download comes with a more detailed guide).
4. In Irfanview, go to Image->Palette->Load palette and find the palette from the folder you unzipped it in. Alternatively, you can copy the palette to the folder you are going to save this image in for future use. Double click the palette file and it's applied on the image. Beware though, the quality is not good and therefore I suggest another, more advanced image editing program for applying the palette with "error diffusion dithering" - much better quality! Just copy-paste the correctly sized image to PSP, Photoshop or GIMP and select error diffusion dithering when applying palette. Whatever method you use, save the image in PCX format (remember NOT to delete the JPG or PNG backup).
5. The smaller driver pics are pretty much the same thing, but their size is 64x64 and aspect ratio is 1.000, respectively. Resize with any of the methods above (except method 3 as there's no ready driver pics, although after making one 64x64 image you can use it as a base for others), but if you have access to "error diffusion dithering", I suggest that you manually resize the images, applying Hermite filter on them instead of Lanczos (copy-paste resizing won't work as it seems to automatically use Lanczos), as the images look a bit less blurrier with that. Apply the palette like with news pics, but instead save it in BMP format (preferably in the BMP folder I told you to create in Part 1, it helps in Part 3).
Part 3: The Starfire Editor
The Starfire Editor is the ultimate tool of GPM2 editing. Even if all the graphics work feels like a huge task, all of it would be of little use without this. Before the release of Dj_ByteDisaster's EDY Viewer/Converter it was the only way to access any of the edy files floating around the game folder, and it's still a much more comfortable way (sorry ByteDisaster ) to edit the few, yet essential EDYs it can (namely driver faces, sponsor images, team logos, engine logos, car side views and the tiny in-race cars). It's also the only tool that can conveniently edit engine HP, weight and home country, sponsor names and, perhaps most importantly, all of the drivers that aren't aligned to a certain team (and make them to be a part of a certain team at the start of the game, of course, though they'll have no contracts; I'll talk about that soon).
1. If you already have a config file (.gcf), skip this part, you can just rename the existing config. Remember though that the DEFAULTS.GCF which is supplied with the original game is buggy, so DON'T use it in any case.
Go to GPM2, click Long term contract, pick any difficulty and team, press 'OK' in the bottom right corner at the next screen, and click save settings. Save the config with any name you want (but preferably the year your mod is going to be about), and exit GPM2.
2. Open Starfire Editor, and configure it by selecting Tools->Options. Select the GPM2.exe in the folder you want to edit (remember that the folder has to have all of the GPM2 files to work, like any of the mods here or the original game). Note that only 1.02 exes work with the Starfire Editor; 1.02B exes won’t load up. If you want to use a 1.02B exe you have to do all of the exe-related edits in a hex editor (a link to the hex-editing guide can be found in Part 5). Select the icon with an arrow pointing to a document, and look for the config you just saved. Open it, and you should get different teams and drivers appear in the editor. Alternatively, if there's already a carset file (.gcd) around, you can go to File->Open and open that file. It should get you the same data that importing from a config file would do (assuming that they're of the same version, of course; all of the mods here contain both a carset file and a config file that have identical information).
NOTE: all of the following steps can be done in any order you want; this is just the order I'm usually doing this.
3. Now you can start editing teams, engines and drivers. I prefer to start with teams. Click on any of the names, and a Team Editor box should appear. Team name and manager can be edited straight there; all of the other data can be edited from either a drop menu, which allows you to select another choice from the existing ones, or by double clicking, which allows you to edit those choices; skill and names for personnel, HP, weight, logo and country for engines and the home track of every team (the editor uses the default track names, so if you're using custom tracks you have to memorise which tracks have been replaced). The personnel and engine edit menus can also be found in the top menu.
Logo editing is similar to all of the graphic editing done via the Starfire Editor, just find your readily-made file and import it to the Editor (you can make the logos at the same time when editing the team data, but the instructions for that are in part 4). For the best balance, look at that year's final standings and put the teams in the same order. If there's more than 13 teams in the season you're editing, then select the 13 best teams based on points, race positions and historical value; if there's less than 13 teams, try to find extra teams like abandoned projects or teams that were around in the previous season(s) or joined F1 in the near future. For personnel: best ones for the top teams, then gradually lower the ratings when going lower in the rankings.
4. Engines can be edited either by double clicking on them in the team menu or from Edit->Engines in the top menu. Engine Quality equals reliability, while the HP and weight figures can be found on the internet in most cases. Sometimes the real-life figures might cause unrealistic team performance; in this case, make edits until you find a good balance.
Here's the minimum and maximum values of the engines:
Max Engine Power: 835 hp
Min Engine Power: 0 hp
Max Engine Weight: 500 kg
Min Engine Weight: 0 kg
It should be noted that very low power and weight figures can lead to glitches, so it's best to avoid power figures under 500 hp and weight figures under 100 kg.
5. To edit drivers, click the driver you're going to edit, and select "Edit Driver". Here you can edit all sorts of data about the driver, including his name, age, nationality, salary, bonuses, statistics and skills (see the Appendix below to know what different skills mean). You should note that drivers will only go to the Rookie Pool if they have both 0 races started and one star in Experience. Use the sites mentioned in Part 1 or any other sources to fill these stats. There should also be a "Modify Picture" button. Click that, and find the BMP file you previously saved in Part 2; it helps if you saved all the driver face BMPs in a separate folder: the editor can remember the folder you are using so it automatically opens when editing the next driver. You can also find a driver pic by typing the first few letters of the filename, after which the editor fills in the rest of the name. Double click on it or select "Open". The image should now appear in the driver's profile. During this step, you can also make the news pics: if you've already saved them, then rename them according to each drivers DF code and move them to the NEWS-subfolder of the mod folder. If you haven't yet done the PCXs (but have resized the JPGS that are of proper size), you can now copy-paste each driver image to Photoshop or PSP, apply the palette and save them straight to the NEWS-folder (again, according to that driver's DF code).
NOTE: only the following drivers have 16/16 contracts at the start of the game; you can see each driver's DF code by opening his profile and looking at the very bottom of that window (This Driver has portrait picture file DFXX.PCX). The drivers that have contracts are: DF0, DF1, DF2, DF3, DF4, DF5, DF7, DF8, DF9, DF11, DF12, DF13, DF15, DF16, DF19, DF20, DF21, DF22, DF23, DF24, DF25, DF27, DF28, DF29, DF30, DF31, DF39, DF40, DF41, DF42, DF46 and DF47 (32 in total; exactly half of the drivers that have pics). In addition DF26 and DF45 have 0/16 contracts.
6. You can edit the external suppliers (fuel, tyres, spare parts, security) by selecting Edit->External Suppliers. Just put in the names you want in these boxes, but remember the letter limit on the right side of these boxes; you can’t write longer names than the limit is. You can also edit the sponsor names by selecting Edit->Sponsors and their logos by selecting Pictures->Sponsor Logos. Editing sponsor logos is pretty straightforward, export the base pictures (right-click on them to bring up the menu) to serve as guidelines, then edit the logo you want on top of the existing ones with the image editing program of your choice, apply palette, save as BMP and import the new ones to the editor (again with right-clicking on the icons). Remember that the bright green (RGB value 0, 255, 0) parts of these images is transparent (i.e. doesn’t appear) in the game itself.
After you've done everything you want (or just want to quit editing for now), save the mod. The Starfire Editor saves all the data (statistics, names, all the pics that are editable with this editor) as a handy backup in case you mess up your config file with the ingame editor or accidentally export wrong data to it from another .gcd file. When it reads "noname.gcd" in the top bar, both of the save icons (the diskettes) open the save box which prompts you to name your new carset (.gcd) file. If it reads something else, then you have either opened a .gcd file or have saved already, which means that you have two options: the icon with just the diskette saves the file with the current filename and overwrites previous data in the file, whereas the icon with a diskette and some dots below it allows you to save the .gcd with a different filename (and keep the older .gcd untouched). Then export the data to GPM2 by choosing File->Export or the icon with an arrow going out from a document, and choose the config file you want to edit (double-click on the file or click Open). You should get a box saying "Carset Exported successfully". The editor has now overwritten all of the .edy files that are editable with the BMPs you imported (they are converted to the edy format, of course), overwrites the engine data in the exe and exports the rest of the data to the config file so you can get the correct data in GPM2 (as GPM2 can't read .gcd because it's a third-party format).
Whenever you return to modding, you can go to File->Reopen to quickly open the .gcd again (or any of the last ten gcd you have opened lately). NOTE: the editor DOES NOT prompt you to save the .gcd if you close the editor with the "X" button, so make sure you save before exiting!
Open GPM2, load your config (see the How to load configs guide, also readable at GPM2World, if you don't know how to open them properly) and look at the drivers you edited. If the pics appear only as black or white squares, you have forgot to apply the palette on the pics in Part 2 (you can see the same thing in the Editor also by exiting the driver profile and opening it again). If they appear as you saw them in the editor, you have just edited your first driver faces! Well done!
If you want to switch between different projects, you have two things to do. First go to File->Close. The editor asks if you want to save if you haven't saved the recent changes. Then go to Tools->Options and reconfigure your exe to the folder you're going to edit next. NOTE: If you're just looking at different .gcd (and perhaps exporting pics such as car side views and matchbox views), there's no need to change the exe. Only when exporting data to a config you must have the correct exe chosen.
APPENDIX - Driver Skills
You may sometimes wonder what all those different driver skills mean. Here's a quick introduction to them that is taken from the official manual (thanks to Steve V for that!) and edited a bit, apart from Motivation, which is not listed in the manual but explained here nonetheless. Take note that "Basic Speed" in the editor is named "Quickness" in-game (hence the "Qu" abbreviation).
Quickness: Used when deciding how fast the driver is capable of driving.
Experience: This will help prevent the driver messing up at the start and how they handle tricky situations - such as when they’re being blocked.
Overtaking: Overtaking is hard enough in Formula One, so if you’ve got a good car you want someone who can slice through the field.
Luck: Used to see what happens when a car goes out (in other words, how easily and how serious injuries the driver may suffer). Also affects the chance of a mechanical failure a little bit.
Stamina: Comes into play at the latter stages of a race. A low stamina increases the chance that the driver makes a big mistake then.
Wet Weather: Good drivers in here get a performance boost when raining, while low-skilled drivers in this category may suffer from wet weather.
Character: Used mostly in contract negotiations, strong characters are generally harder to negotiate with.
Reliability: Can you depend on the driver that he/she will do as he is told to do without losing concentration (and spinning off/crashing).
Intelligence: Used with Experience when the driver must handle tricky situations. Also affects how well the driver can improve his/her skills.
Ambition: Used in negotiations and deciding whether to modify motivation - ambitious people want to win, else they want to leave.
Leadership: Helps train the two lower drivers (driver two and test driver).
Motivation: Affects the drivers speed and reliability as well as negotiations; low motivation drivers are generally slower, less reliable and tougher to negotiate than their well-motivated counterparts with the same other skills.
Part 4: Team and engine logos, menu and news pictures
So, you've edited all the team and driver data, and now think that most of the work is now done. But you’re wrong, only about half of the work has been done at this point!
In the previous part of this guide I briefly mentioned team and engine logos. So here's the full guide:
1. Team logos have the size of 32x32 and engine logos are 16x16, respectively. The following part applies for both of them, only the size is different.
2. After finding a suitable picture for the logo, copy-paste it in Paint (oh yes, THAT Paint, you didn’t misread it!). The reason we’re using Paint here is that it has two good features: instant cropping (just grab a hold of the edge of the image and start moving your mouse, make sure you don‘t have anything selected though) and easy select-move controls (select a part of the image, hold it with the left mouse button and move your mouse). Once you’ve got that picture loaded up in Paint, start cropping. Yet you can only crop from the right and down of the image, so you’ll have to do this to get the other edges as well: press Ctrl+A to select the image as a whole, then move the image so the left- and topsides are also cropped to the point you want them to be. Then just crop the extra white space on the right and down of the image. The object is to get the image to be as square as possible. However, this is very often not the case with team logos, even after cropping all of the "extra" off from the image; most often you’ll end up in an image that has a lot more width than height. Just increasing the height would result in a logo with very small text. Luckily there’s a couple of ways to help make the picture squarer:
Method 1: If the image has a lot of text or other stuff, you can select a part of the image and move it under/on top of the text, depending on which part of the image you chose (remember to extend the pic’s height first). Then just crop the extra width and fill the extended part with the correct background color.
Method 2: If the team has a distinctive logo, use only that instead of the logo and the text. Alternatively, you can just take the first letter of their name and use that as a logo.
When you’ve got the logo ready, import it to another program (Irfanview can do just fine here), resize it to the correct size, apply the palette and save the logo as BMP.
Now, it's time to do the 'big thing' as I like to call it: the menu images. For these I recommend the '3+1' method, which means three Irfanview windows plus PSP/Photoshop opened, making things a lot quicker.
NOTE: the next part is easy if you associated the PCX and JPG files with Irfanview during its installation: just double-click a file and it opens in Irfanview.
3. Open any picture from the folder you saved all the pics (the main folder; you had different subfolders for drivers and logos, right?) in Irfanview, then open a menu picture from the main folder of the mod (those .PCXs floating around) in another Irfanview window, then open a third window from the mod’s main folder also. So in the first window you can now scroll through all of the files you saved, but only if they’re not too big for your screen (the program just scrolls that image instead of changing them), which means that you’ll either have to zoom out with the minus button as a temporary solution (has to be repeated every time you encounter this image) OR as a permanent solution resize them to be a bit smaller so they’ll fit your screen (GPM2 pics are only 640x480 at largest so it has no detrimental effects). In the other two windows you can scroll through the PCX, text and audio files of the main folder. But why two, you’ll ask? Because it helps in the editing process a lot.
4. Scroll to the first image of the mod’s folder in both of these windows. Now, observe what is happening in that picture and what the image name is (if you have played the game a bit, you’ll most likely know where it appears). Once you get the hang of these you can just go editing straight away when making your next mod. Select the whole image by pressing Ctrl+A. You’ll now see the size and aspect ratio for that image. The most common sizes are: 640x480 (1.333), 640x461 (1.388) and 640x460 (1.391).
Now, go to the window that hosts your basic images, pick a suitable image and select a part of it that closely matches the menu picture in terms of aspect ratio. Get to the first Irfanview window (the one that has the whole image selected) and paste. Now, you’ve got a base for a new menu pic. If the menu image has any "transparent" sections (the area that is under the text in-game; blue-grayish in the original game, usually dark in the mods), you can just use my handy menu templates to apply these on the resized base image. To do this, open a menu template in the advanced edting program of your choice, paste the resized base image as a new layer, move it behind the template layer, apply the palette and save as PCX. Then just rinse and repeat the same process with all the other menu images (excluding the ones I've listed as unneeded; see below)!
5. Some of the pictures are not actually included in the game; they’re just leftovers from GPM1 and stuff that was cut from the final game. Obviously, these don’t have to be edited for the mod. These are: END.PCX, FIAPANEL.PCX, PITBOARD.PCX, STAFFLIX.PCX, TD_WINP2.PCX, TD_WINPT.PCX, TESTINT.PCX (even if it seems to be a normal GPM2 menu image), TVTEST.PCX, TVTEST2.PCX.
6. Additionally, some of the pics appear ingame, but don’t have to be necessarily edited to make a good mod. I’ve marked all of the pics that you can somewhat easily edit if you want to with "edit for better looks" and those that aren‘t usually edited because of being too laborious to edit are marked with "laborious to edit"; just leave the others to be.
BANK.PCX (bank screen, edit if you want better looks), BENCH2.PCX (driver aid setup, laborious to edit because of the icons) CAREXT.PCX (car externals, laborious to edit), CARINT.PCX (car internals, laborious to edit), CARSETUP.PCX (car setup, laborious to edit), CFGMAIN.PCX (appears when you configure the main screen, and is covered with buttons, so it‘s hard to spot any difference even if edited), DUMGAME.PCX (purpose unknown; leave it be), DUMRACE.PCX (same as previous), EDCOM.PCX (one of the title screens, just leave it be, this firm deserves credit from this game!), FIALOGO.PCX (shown at the end of the season, edit if you have to change the FIA logo), GROUND.PCX (purpose unknown; leave it be), INTROPIC.PCX (same as previous), MPLOGO.PCX (another title screen, the game's original distributor, just leave it be), MTCSTRI2 and MTCSTRIP.PCX (the top bars of the game screen), NEWS and NEWS2.PCX (the base images for news), OPT13.PCX (e-mail screen, edit if you want better looks), OUTRACE.PCX (purpose unknown; leave it be), PROFLOSS (profit & loss screen, edit for better looks), RACEPAN.PCX (used in race), SECURITY.PCX (security contract screen, edit for better looks), SHELVES.PCX (used when changing parts, leave it be), SITE.PCX (team facilities build screen; if you want to edit it, leave the hand-drawn area as it is), SPNSRS.PCX, SPONCONT.PCX and SPONDEAL.PCX (sponsor screens, no need to edit and the SPONDEAL.PCX is not that easy to edit), TEAMSITE.PCX (circuit screen, a bit laborious to edit because of the track icons, only edit if you have changed the tracks), TOYSHOP.PCX (merchandise screen, laborious to edit because of the product icons), TV_SET.PCX (the TV screen during races if you watch them in top down view), TVCOVER.PCX (covered in text ingame, not necessary to edit), TVSTUDIO.PCX (very laborious to edit), TVTESTNO.PCX (shown for a tiny moment when going to TV mode in races), WEAT1-WEAT5.PCX (weather pictures on the TV screen during races if you watch them in top down view) and WEATPIC1-WEATPIC5 (same as previous, only for TV Mode; the ideal place for these would actually be the TVS folder rather than the main one, but for some reason they are stored here instead), WIND and WIND2.PCX (wind tunnel pics, hard to edit).
7. So, there was the menu pics, and the next step is going to be a cakewalk when compared to that. Now, we're going for the news pics; you made a part of these when making the driver news pics, so let’s do the rest of them now. There's only a couple of things to mention, as most of this is just resizing & applying palette (and the observation part if you're making your first mod). There's two types of news image: the flat ones (590x180, 3.278) and the tall ones (256x350, 0.731, familiar from the driver pics). There's also a few images that do not appear ingame, being leftovers from GPM1. These are: CONCERN.PCX, MAN1.PCX, MAN2.PCX, PARTY1.PCX, and WELCOME.PCX. Also, the one with the security camera doesn't have to necessarily be replaced, since it's a "timeless" image. The other thing to note is that some images are controlled by the "base order" of the teams. By base order, I mean the order that you'll see them in the editor, not in game (since you can alter the order of the teams with the game's own editor too). In essence: if you put Williams to be the first team in the editor, then the Williams team uses the 13A, 13AA etc. pictures in the news, and the next team 13B etc. pics, and so on. They will use these images no matter what you change the order to be with the ingame editor.
Part 5: Finishing touches, advanced config editing, hex editing, string editing, EDY editing and track editing
Okay, the majority of the work is now done, and there's not that much to do anymore before you can release your mod (unless you want to use the mod in a 1.02B EXE, in which case there's still a lot of hex editing to do). In this part we handle the car side views, matchbox views, car numbers, starting year and top downs, with references to the advanced config editing, hex editing, EDY editing and track editing guides.
1. You may have noticed that I've referred to the car side views and “matchbox” views a few times in the earlier parts of this guide, but only now I'll tell you how to make them.
First, open the Starfire Editor and the project you are working on. Then go to Pictures ->Cars and select any of the teams. This is the screen where you can edit the aforementioned pictures. Export one to get a reference, but if you like, you don't have to export the side view since I‘ll tell you about them soon enough, just export a matchbox view to serve as a base for editing.
Second, open a ready side view image (downloaded from Speed Racing, for example). Use the "Move and crop" method in Paint to get rid of the extra space. Then, copy-paste this side view to Irfanview (other programs work as well, but I've found this one to be the easiest to use). Start painting the white edges of the image with bright green (RGB value 0, 255, 0). Zoom in to be more accurate with this. Painting the white edges green allows that only the part of the image that has some other colors on it (i.e. the car itself) will appear.
NOTE: If you're using the flood fill/paint bucket tool (which is highly recommended) and the car has white and/or very light-coloured parts near the edges of the car, make sure that you outline these parts (with the transparent green, for example) so that they don't get painted as well.
2. When finished with the painting process, resize the image 128x30. I suggest using Hermite filter instead of Lanczos when using Irfanview. Also, most of the time the aspect ratio isn't correct enough for the "Preserve aspect ratio" option to work properly, so tick it off and type both of the dimensions manually. After resizing, zoom in again and look for any "dirty green" on the edges of the car (slightly darker or brighter shades of green; if you don't remove those the car has very dodgy edges in-game). After that's done, apply the palette and check for any "dirty green" again, just in case. When finished, save the image as BMP and import it to the Starfire Editor from Pictures-> Cars.
3. The "matchbox" cars are a bit trickier. These are the cars you see going around the track when watching them from the top down view. Luckily, they're not so accurate on detail (how could a car that's 6 pixels in size?), so most of the time you can import them from other mods or have to edit them only a little. To do this, open another gcd file (in another Starfire Editor window, I prefer), open Pictures->Cars, select the team you want, click "Export" below the "Matchbox View" text, and name it what you like. Then, if the matchbox view is already suitable enough for your mod, just apply the palette (Starfire Editor exports the images in 24-bit BMP format, which is unsuitable for GPM2), save and import it to your project. If it isn't, then you have to edit them. First apply the palette on the image (to make sure you won't be using any wrong colours). Then, try to observe the main parts of the car livery you're making and start painting those little cars accordingly (zoom in as much as you want). Save as BMP and import to the editor like the side views.
4. Whenever you are finished, you have to export the new images to GPM2. This happens at the same time when exporting data to the config file; the editor converts all the images you have edited to the edy format and overwrites the existing ones.
5. The car numbers can be edited only through the ingame editor. To do this, open your config file normally, but at the point where you would re-select your team choose "Drivers" instead. Now, you can edit their car numbers by simply clicking on the driver and typing a new number to the "Car number:" box below the first row of his/her skills. The only thing you should note that you cannot swap numbers: for example, if Schumacher has number 1 and Alonso number 3, you cannot type "1" in Alonso's box, you'll just get a message saying that "Please change the number because it is already being used by Michael Schumacher". You'll also risk running into a serious bug; see below for a workaround. Instead, you'll have to change Schumi's number to be like "99", and only then you can change Alonso's number to be 1.
KNOWN BUG: If you happen to change a driver's number to the same that someone else is using, you'll trigger a small bug. In essence, the game exits the current driver's editing screen and returns to the main driver screen, but actually the editing window is still running on the background. If you click on any of the drivers when this bug is active, you'll see some stars appear on the screen where they shouldn't appear, but nothing else changes. Clicking on any of the drivers again will cause the second driver of the 4th team to be deleted. In this case, the only option is to reload the config. Luckily, there's a workaround. Instead of attempting to re-edit the driver you were just editing when the window prompting you to change the driver's number appeared, just click on the “OK” button in the bottom-right corner. Nothing seems to happen, but it actually clears the editing window from running hidden on the background. Now you can edit normally again.
6. The car top downs are a tricky part. These are the ones that appear in the sponsor negotiation, driver setup and after-race screens. They are also controlled by the "base value" (remember from the news pics?); CAROVR0 is for the first team, CAROVR1 for the second and so on. As always the car's background must be transparent, but now you have alternatives: either the familiar bright green (0, 255, 0), a darker green (0, 127, 0) or a special grey (111, 107, 107). The latter two colours work only on the car top downs, while the first one is used everywhere else but works fine with these, too. I can't tell much about the drawing process itself, I've never been good at it and usually resorted to other members of the community.
7. There are a number of ways with which you can enhance the mod beyond what conventional editing methods can do. You can hex edit both the config file and EXE to change features that are normally not editable. You can also edit all EDY files, even those not accessible with the Starfire Editor, with DjByteDisaster's EDY Viewer/Converter. With Resource hacker, you can change all text strings in the game, even up to a point that allows for fan translations. Finally, you can even make custom tracks with Kroah's Track Editor.
Since there are so many variables to edit it's easier to just post links to detailed guides to each feature:
Backmarker's config editing guide
EXE Hex Editing Guide (only for 1.02B EXEs)
EDY Viewer/Converter Guide
Resource Hacker text string guide
Kroah's Track Editor (guide included in the download)
8. Finally, you've got your mod finished. Now it's just checking that everything is correct and in place, and that you haven't forgot to put a palette on any of the pictures. After this, you can release your mod! Congratulate yourself on a job well done. Upload it on a file sharing website so others can access it (MediaFire is my personal favorite, but there are other good ones as well). Post about it on the GPRaceGames forums (preferably in the "Mods" section). Contact Sionco if you think your mod is so good that it could be uploaded on this site. Move on to a next project, if you're ambitious and have the itch to mod some more. Maybe someday you'll be more popular than yours truly! Or just take a break for now and relax, let modding rest for a while. Whatever you do, you have just contributed for the community and helped keep this wonderful game alive!
See ya!