Racer track conversion howto

[thelusiv]

Joe has written a howto for converting Racer tracks (such as the ones found on racer-xtreme.com) and checked it into the vdrift-trackeditor SVN repository. Here it is in its current form. Note that these instructions (and the tools too) assume that you're running Linux.

• Unzip and put racer files in temporary folder RACER_TP (temporary track path). Make sure the path has no spaces (dof2joe doesn't like spaces).
  
• Create new folder for track in track editor folder TRACKEDITOR_TP.
  
• Convert all texture names to lowercase in TRACKEDITOR_TP via
  Code:

  find . -type f -name \*.tga|sort -r|awk '{f=tolower($1);
if(f!=$1 && p[f]!=1){print "mv "$1" "f}p[$1]=1}' | /bin/sh
• Make folder TRACKEDITOR_TP/objects/
  
• Run the following command:
  Code:

  dof2joe/dof2joe -p TRACKEDITOR_TP/objects/ RACER_TP/*.dof
  If there are thousands of .dof files, you may have to do this in steps to avoid a "too many arguments" error from your shell. This will take a while. Textures are automatically converted using nconvert. No filenames should have spaces.
  
• Open track editor /data/tracks/editor.config and set active track to TRACKEDITOR_TP.
  
• Run the track editor. Trace the roadways and mark the starting position (press H for help).
  
• CD to the TRACKEDITOR_TP/objects folder (this is important, the packfile stores relative paths) and run
  Code:

  joepack/joepack -c objects.jpk *.joe
• Copy TRACKEDITOR_TP into the main VDrift tracks folder VDRIFT_TP. Erase VDRIFT_TP/objects/*.joe (since they are in the pack file).
  
• Add your VDRIFT_TP to VDrift/data/tracks/track_list.txt
  
• Add VDRIFT_TP/about.txt and ensure that the first line is the name of the track.
  
• Run VDrift and check out what the track looks like in-game. Note that you will only be able to drive on the roadways you defined in the track editor since no other surfaces have been flagged as collideable. Also take a screenshot for the track selection screen.
  
• Add the track selection screenshot to VDrift/gui/tracks/VDRIFT_TP.png (hopefully these png files will be moved into the folders of the individual tracks soon).
  
• Open up all of the texture files in TRACKEDITOR_TP/objects and review which textures belong to objects that should be collide-able (roads and walls), have full brightness (trees), be mipmapped (fences and fine transparent objects should not be mipmapped), or be skyboxes.
  
• Any textures that have transparent areas are usually colored #FF00FF in the Racer textures. You'll need to make these truly transparent in the PNG files. An easy way to do this is to use ImageMagick. Use the command
  Code:

  mogrify -transparent rgb\(255,0,255\) file.png
  This can be scripted to speed things up of course.
  
• Set the correct object properties using the VDrift-tracked/listedit tool (more documentation to come).
  
• Done!

To do all these things you'll need all the stuff in the trackeditor repository. Most of these tools are still a bit rough around the edges, but they're usable.