Dash Manager

Dash Manager is the name of a tool developed by Cas designed as a more immediate and visual way of editing Stunts cars dashboards. At its initial beta launch with version 0.1 in 2020, it was part of a project together with CarWorks 0.1 that represents the preliminary stage of the modern CarWorks, albeit already being useful. A forum thread was started on 10 December 2020 in which the first versions were posted. Since 18 May 2021, when CarWorks 1.0 was first released, Dash Manager has been incorporated as a section of the program.

The original program can load all uncompressed car files except the 3D shapes (3SH) and can also load BMP images. It has a text-mode menu and a graphical display of the dashboard. The most powerful capability it provides is that of automatically generating way points for the steering wheel, the gear box and the instruments. An arc is created that can be stretched and turned and then, pressing Enter generates a set of way points that are visible in the graphical display. Saving the RES file will make the changes effective.

While it is much simpler and direct to edit the dashboard this way, it is clear that some internals are not fully understood, especially about transparency in the instrument images, because artifacts tend to appear even when doing everything right. Yet, one can very quickly set up a working dashboard from still images and later concentrate on fixing these artifacts manually with Stressed if they appear.