Track file format specifications

[thelusiv]

I think the information seeked here is how parts of the car definition file work. It's hard to get a good idea of all of it, and while I've created a car from scratch there are still a few things that I had to "fudge" in the file to get it just right.

Some things like positions are hard to get a good idea of. I do it by opening the model in Blender and looking at the coordinates reported by the modeler. I can explain this in more detail if someone is interested.

If you're wondering about the units of things, when we say that they use MKS that means meters, kilograms, and seconds. Of course there are other things besides just distance, mass and time to express in the game, but for the most part they can be derived from those three units. For instance, torque is in Newton-meters per second. This is important to know for adapting dyno torque charts in ft-lbs/sec to torque settings in the car file.

Other things that are handy to know is that 1.0 units of distance in Blender is equal to 1.0 units of distance in the game, which represents 1.0 meters in the real world. Also, the positions in Blender must be modified slightly for the car files. Blender shows (X, Y, Z) formatted positions. VDrift wants them in the order (Y, -X, Z).