Dash Manager

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Revision as of 07:54, 4 March 2021 by Cas (talk | contribs)

Dash Manager is a tool developed by Cas designed as a more immediate and visual way of editing Stunts cars dashboards. Together with CarWorks, 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 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.