Individual Meshes And Textures

A DLL to enable customisable loading for meshes and textures in Grand Prix 4

Description

This DLL expands original Grand Prix 4 to allow full control of how meshes (front/rear wheels, helmets, cockpits, cars) and textures (cockpits, helmets) are loaded, supporting per-driver, per-team, and per-track custom loading. It includes features to manage LODs (Level of Detail), auto-naming conventions, and fallbacks to default GP4 assets when custom assets are unavailable. See Usage for more info.

Getting Started

Dependencies

• GP4MemLib
• IniLib

Prerequisites

• Grand Prix 4
• GP4 Memory Access by Carl_gpgames (recommended) or
• CheatEngine or
• Any other DLL injection tool

Installing

GP4 Memory Access

Under the DLLs tab, add an entry pointing to IndividualMeshesAndTextures.dll. Make sure that IndividualMeshesAndTextures.ini is located in the same folder as the DLL.

Usage

All settings are contained in IndividualMeshesAndTextures.ini and everything is designed to revert back to default GP4 behaviour, including if IndividualMeshesAndTextures.ini itself missing. The IndividualMeshesAndTextures.ini file that is included with the release is also pre-configured to mimic GP4's default behaviour.

IndividualMeshesAndTextures.ini is divided in 4 logical sections:

• Individual Meshes
• LOD Table
• Settings
• Assets Settings

Individual Meshes

This section contains entries to enable individual mesh loading for mesh types that are generic by default in GP4: Front Wheels, Rear Wheels, Helmets and Cockpits. Entries can be set to true / false or 1 / 0.

Cars are not included in this section, as they are already use individual loading by default and IndividualMeshesAndTextures.dll, by design choice, does not allow to set them as generic.

[IndividualMeshes]
FrontWheels = false
RearWheels = false
Helmets = false
Cockpits = false

LOD Table

This section allows to specify which LODs (Levels of Detail) will be used by each mesh type. GP4 allows a maximum of 5 LODs per mesh type. IndividualMeshesAndTextures.dll will automatically exclude all 0 values at the end of each entry, and will also 0-fill any entries that contain less than 5 values, guaranteeing full compatibility with GP4 internal loading.

[LODTable]
FrontWheels	=	0,	1,	2,	3,	0
RearWheels	=	0,	1,	2,	3,	0
Helmets		=	0,	1,	2,	3,	0
Cockpits	=	0,	0,	0,	0,	0
Cars		=	0,	1,	2,	3,	4

Settings

This section contains only one entry: TrackFolders. This utility setting, in combination with AutoName found in each individual asset section (see Assets Settings), tells IndividualMeshesAndTextures.dll to look into track subfolders for those assets that are have PerTrack set to true.

Tracks are indexed 1 through 17.

[Settings]
TrackFolders = false

Example - Per-Track Cars with Track Folders enabled

[Settings]
TrackFolders = true

[Cars]
AutoName = true
PerTrack = true

Ferrari's first car (LOD 0) at Monza will be loaded as follows

cars\track15\car_ferrari_car1_lod_0.gp4

Assets Settings

These sections are, more specifically:

• Front Wheels
• Rear Wheels
• Helmets
• Cockpits
• Cars
• Helmet Textures
• Cockpit Textures

They all share a common structure, with some minor differences for the two texture sections:

AutoName = true
LOD0Only = false
PerTeam = false
PerDriver = false
PerTrack = false
FileName = 
Tracks = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17

AutoName

Available for all assets, AutoName works in conjunction with IndividualMeshes, PerTeam, PerDriver, PerTrack and TrackFolders, and allows IndividualMeshesAndTextures.dll to automatically determine what file names to use, depending on the chosen options.

AutoName follows the convention of original GP4 files, trying to keep it as close as possible to the original file names, including the little differences like LOD_0 for Cars and Wheels and 00 for Helmets and Cockpits.

See PerTrack for some more details, it is recommended to check the GPxPatch debug log for the asset name(s) being loaded.

LOD0Only

Available for mesh entries only, overrides the corresponding entry in the LOD Table, forcing to use only LOD 0.

PerTeam, PerDriver, PerTrack

Available for all assets, these settings only have an effect when AutoName is enabled for the corresponding asset.

• PerTrack, when not using TrackFolders, will append _track_{track} at the end of the filename.
• PerDriver will combine {teamname} with car 1 and 2 for meshes, while using {driver} for textures.

See FileName for more details about {variables}.

FileName

Available for all assets, this setting allows to specify a custom file name pattern for each asset. For Helmet Textures, there are two independent settings, one per texture: FileName1 and FileName2.

7 {variables} are available to use in the file names, enclosed in curly brackets:

• {track} - Available for all assets. Indexed 1 through 17
• {team} - Available for all textures, available for meshes only when IndividualMeshes is not enabled for the corresponding mesh. Indexed 1 through 11.
• {teamname} - Available for all textures, available for meshes only when IndividualMeshes is enabled for the corresponding mesh.
• {car} - Available for all textures, available for meshes only when IndividualMeshes is enabled for the corresponding mesh. Indexed 1 and 2 for first and second car of the team.
• {driver} - Available for all textures, available for meshes only when IndividualMeshes is enabled for the corresponding mesh. Indexed 1 through 12 and 14 through 23 (as for original GP4 helmet textures, following 2001 car numbering)
• {driverindex} - Available for all textures, available for meshes only when IndividualMeshes is enabled for the corresponding mesh. Indexed 1 through 22.
• {lod} - Available for for meshes only, follows the corresponding entry in the LOD Table

Please note that texture entries need to have the extension explicitly written as either .tex or .tga.

Example - Per-Team Helmet mesh and Per-Track Helmet Textures

[Helmets]
FileName=car_helmet_{teamname}_0{lod}

[HelmetTextures]
FileName1=driver{driver}_track_{track}_1.tga
FileName1=driver{driver}_track_{track}_2.tga

Ferrari's first driver helmet assets at Monza will be loaded as follows

cars\car_helmet_ferrari_00.gp4
cars\driver1_track_15_1.tex
cars\driver1_track_15_2.tex

Subolders can be included as part of the FileName entry. Please note that the directory separator character has to be escaped and written as \\.

Example - Per-Track generic Helmet mesh

[Helmets]
FileName=track{track}\\car_helmet_0{lod}

The Helmet mesh at Monza will be loaded as follows

cars\track15\car_helmet_00.gp4

Tracks

Available for all assets, this setting allows some additional control when using per-track assets, either with the PerTrack setting or the manual {track} variable. Acknowledging that not all tracks might need their own unique asset, with this setting is possible to specify a fall-back track index for each track slot. If an asset isn't found for the track slot, the asset from the specified fall-back track slot will be attempted to be loaded, before reverting back to GP4's default. If less than 17 entries are present, track 1 will be used for the missing track slots.

Example - Per-Team Helmet mesh, with Track Folders enabled and all fall-back tracks set to 1

[Settings]
TrackFolders = true

[Cars]
AutoName = true
PerTrack = true
Tracks = 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1

Ferrari's first car (LOD 0) at Monza will be loaded as follows

cars\track15\car_ferrari_car1_lod_0.gp4

If the asset doesn't exist, the fall-back track slot will be used

cars\track1\car_ferrari_car1_lod_0.gp4

If the fall-back asset also doesn't exist, GP4's default file will be used

cars\car_ferrari_car1_lod_0.gp4

Authors

Diego "Öggo" Noriega

Version History

• 1.1

  • Update - Fall-back track slots

• 1.0

  • First Release

• 0.1

  • Pre-Release