Car Blaster

Car Blaster title screen.

Car Blaster is a graphical DOS hex editor for the CAR*.RES files which define car parameters in Stunts. It was developed by Mark Nailwood and released in its current version (3.2) in 1997. Car Blaster offers a number of conveniences which make editing of paramters far more comfortable than with a standard hex editor, and thus is employed by virtually all current car tuners.

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Limitations and bugs

Noteworthy issues with regular Car Blaster usage include:

• The "Load Car" routine (accessed via F3 in the main menu) fails to load the CAR*.RES of cars using the Audi car shape (STAUDI.P3S), allegedly due to an out-of-bounds file size. Since the program does not use actual graphics data, there would be no justification for such restriction. It is possible, however, to edit cars with Audi graphics - the user merely has to load another car and employ the "Swap Car" (F9/F10) feature on the main interface.
• Users of the "Swap Car" keybindings must be wary that pressing F9 (swap to the previous car) with the first (in alphabetical order) CAR*.RES on foreground or F10 (swap to next car) with the last car selected will cause an unhandled segmentation fault, and thus a hard crash.
• When saving a CAR*.RES file, CarBlaster will check for the existence of the *.PVS and *.P3S (but not *.VSH and *.3SH) graphic files for the car. if they are not present, the program will create copies of the graphics of the last regular car loaded and rename them accordingly so they can be used with the new car. While this behaviour is intentional (aiming to save time when creating a new car using some of the default car graphics), it becomes an annoyance when developing cars with custom graphic files.

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