car components, damage, a new windows build

[joevenzon]

I like it. The way the CONFIGFILE format that the .car files use is set up, if you load in one file and then load another file, it'll keep settings from the original file and any duplicate settings in the new file will overwrite the ones from the original file. So what you're talking about with the .car file inheritance is very do-able.

Maybe the "higher level" .car files would have top-level parameters (not in a section) called include1, include2, etc that would specify other .car files to load first; so the vr1.car might have:
include1=base.car

Also, right now the names of the .joe files are always the same. It sounds like for this system to work we'd want the .car files to specify which .joe files to load, and do it in a way that the subsequent .car files could overwrite the names. So maybe there'd be a section in the .car file called [models] or something, and then the game would automatically load any values that are put in that section. So the base corvette might have:
[models]
body = body.joe
hood = hood.joe
...and so on

And then the zr1.car file would have the values that are overridden, like:
[models]
hood=hood_zr1.joe

There would probably need to be special logic to handle mirroring any models that have "wheel" in the name.

Anyway, just brainstorming, what do you think?