Savage Elve's tips


1. When making a special effects box you can make the sky color 183 instead of -1. This way you can see when you enter the area.

2. If you open up the race.dat file with CarEd and save it as a .obj, you can easily add patches and small parts to the race. Just export the part in CarEd as a component then open and export as .ASC. PT2 can read these .ASC files, as long as it exists of only one single component, and by doing so the patches will seamlessly fit in the race and it's easy to make parts the right proportions.

3. When you start a new track use the initials for both textures and non-cars. (I know, I forgot, now I can't change it anymore)

4. Make use of the hierarchy in PT2. Put non-cars and powerups in the hierarchy of the part they are in. This way you can move the part outside and position the non-cars easily. You shouldn't have to scroll to see all the main parts when the hierarchy is collapsed in the overview.

5. Mark all the changes you make in drone.txt, peds.txt etc. so people can choose whether to overwrite the file (an loose settings from other tracks) or change them manually.

6. Make a drawing on paper before you start the first lay-out. Later you will feel sorry if you didn't.

7. Backup three files very regularly; the race.act, race.dat, race. mat and the race.txt. I'm sure if all people had done so, there should be one or more tracks for C2. Make a backup script and put it in your start menu. Also, never make a backup until you have tried it in the game: what's the use of making backup of something that doesn't work?

8. Sometimes when using calculate smoothing groups', the lightning just looks bad. Then try without. Lighting will change anyways, with or without.

9. When putting a name in default material, there were peds on that material, while I didn't put that in the .txt file.

10. If you want to make a mini-map; C2 seems not to be able to read the PT2 generated one. Make a nice screenshot of the track in PT2. Then make a new material in PT2 and use the PT2 generated-pix. Make a screenshot. Then resize the tiny rectangular to 640x480. Take the other screenshot and resize it to 640x480. Then put this one is a layer, 50% opacity over the other. Now you can stretch and move the screenshot so the roads will fit with the roads on the roads (hardly visible) on the generated map. When finished, make the top-layer 100% opacity and save it. Of course you have to copy the coords to the race.txt file, which are given by PT2 while preprocessing.

11. Maybe it works; I tried but it didn't work; If you want to add, say 40 trees with the name &25tree.act make a separate .sdf file to make a group of ten trees. Give them a two digit number, eg &25tree01.act etc. Then save this same file with another name. With the rename function of PT2 you can change only one digit in a group of parts; So &25tree01.act...&25tree09.act, becomes &25tree11.act...&25tree19.act. These groups you can import in your level. As I said, it didn't work with me because my comp became very slow. Maybe it works when you import the track into the group of trees and save it with the trackname.