CarWorks

CarWorks is a tool developed by Cas with the purpose of aiding in custom car creation by providing some degree of automation to the process. Together with Dash Manager, it is part of a project that started in 2020 and as of March 2021 remains in a preliminary stage, albeit already being useful. A forum thread was started on 10 December 2020 in which the first versions were posted.

The interface is mostly text-based. Different uncompressed car files can be loaded and edited and then put together. It can load and save OBJ shape files that it automatically scales so that cars have a natural size in meters. It was originally intended to handle all of the car files, but at the current stage, it can do mainly two things: edit car parameters in a way that's more direct than with Car Blaster and generate a complete 3SH file for a car from an OBJ shape producing all three scales and borrowing wheels and debris from a pre-existing car. The car files can later be edited with Stressed, so it's optimal to use them together.

Editing car parameters

Upon entering the program, menu option 7 (Load Stunts car parameters) can be used to load a CAR*.RES file. Then, option 9 (Edit parameters) leads to a simple screen in which each parameter can be entered numerically. At the bottom, a graphical representation of the torque curve can be edited with the mouse pointer. After finishing, option 8 (Save Stunts car parameters) can be used to write the CAR*.RES file back. It's important to load a RES file before editing, as other existing data in the file will be kept, such as parameters that control the dashboard, which cannot be edited from here. If the RES file is written starting from an empty session, all these parameters will be set to zero, which can be harder to edit later.

CarWorks was made using the Stunts Wiki as a reference. The car parameters were at that time described relative to the beginning of the file instead of the beginning of the simd block (see Car parameters). For this reason, files with a different chunk ordering will not load correctly into CarWorks. The ordering can be changed in Stressed.

Creating a car shape file

The most useful way to work with this tool