Carmageddon II . Hall of Maim

Information and Tips

We're not playing carmageddon to complete it anymore. We're just having a a smoke and a laugh and have cheated and tweaked the game so much, that to give it to you all in one go would be far too generous. SO, over the coming months, we'll be showing you what you can do to spruce up the game.

If you have a great discovery you want to share, send it to us!. Go to the send yours page for more details.

Performance Tips

In the data/ folder, options.txt contains a number of settings you can tweak to improve the performance of the game. NOTE: These settings are NOT available from the in-game options menu. Alternatively, if you have a ninja-bastard PC, you can ramp up the detail and draw levels far in advance of the options presented to you in the game.

WallTexturingLevel Default=2.
Change to 1 to gain some FPS. It appears to lower the quality of the textures. Although the difference is hardly noticable.

CarTexturingLevel Default=2.
Change to 1 improves the performance when there are a lot of cars on the screen. Set to 0 to turn off car textures!! (and race around in silver boxes!!)

Yon Default=30.
Sets the draw distance. Worth playing with especially if you have a faster PC and want to set the draw distance far into the distance. Decreasing it to 5 however makes the game unplayable (but a laugh for a while) as you cant really see anything further than 3 feet!

YonFactor Default=0.50000
Appears to set the depth cueing cutoff for the draw distance (if that makes sense). Goes hand in hand with setting the Yon draw distance. Eg. If Yon=100, then setting YonFactor to 0.10000 makes the scenery cut off in large chunks. Making it higher (0.90000) Smoothly fades the draw distance out. Experiment if you have the power!

AccessoryRendering Default=1.
Accessories are other movable objects in the game besides cars and peds. You can only set this On (1) or Off (0). Turn it off and you can wave goodbye to all the lampposts, harrier jets, and all the other nice extra bits of movable scenery :(

SmokeOn Default=1.
Turns on or off (1/0) the smoke effects in the game. Smoke (as all transparent textures in games) slows the game down quite a bit. This is really only something you need to do if things are really bad (>200mhz) as it takes a vital part of the game away.

In the data/peds/ folder, settings.txt has a few options you can change which, provided you have a meaty enough PC, can improve the experience.

// Max distance from camera that peds are processed within Default=24
Great value to increase if you have increased the Draw Distance (Yon)

// Min distance from camera that peds can suddenly pop up at Default=9
Obvious really! Adjust this with the ped processed parameter to get the game to draw the peds far away in the distance - Good if you want to follow a ped during a replay when the car moves far away from it.

Silly & Stupid Tips - Getting started

Before we begin, you'll need to do some work! In the Carmageddon II Carpocalypse now folder, data.twt contains 8 files which control a lot of the game settings. Before you can start editing these files, you need to understand how Carmageddon works.

The game will look for these 8 files in two ways.

1. If data.twt exists in the Carmageddon II Carpocalypse now/ folder it will use the 8 files contained within.

2. If data.twt doesnt exist, then the game looks for all 8 individual files in the data/ folder.

So, knowing this, your best bet if you are gonna change a lot of things, is to get a twt expander program, like twtsuite. Expand all 8 files to the data/ folder. Then Rename the data.twt file to something like data.twat. Now you are ready to edit the games settings.

I realise that this isnt exatly NEW information for Carma editing veterans, but all you newbies out there must be getting frustrated by the lack on information out there on how to edit Carmageddon's configuration files.

Silly & Stupid Tips - Fun things to do

Edit General.txt and have a go at changing the following:

// Mutant tail thing settings

// Number of links
including ball Default=4.
Hilarious if you increase it above 10!

// Mass of each link Default=0.1
Works best if you keep this low.

// Mass of ball Default=0.3
A heavier ball is a good laugh in Pinball mode so long as you pick a light car.

Edit Powerup.txt and try a few of these:

// Powerup 3: Giant zombies!

// Floating point param #1 (size factor) Default=2.0
There are 3 values here, all with the same tag. They control (in order), X size, Y size and Z size. Increase all three values and you wont believe how big a cow can get! Or just increase Z size for super deep peds! CTRL+ALT+3 to activate in cheat mode.

// Powerup 43: Zombies with stupid heads!

// Floating point param #1 (size factor) Default=4.0
Similar to the last powerup mod, but you've just gotta check out the big Deer head) go on, whack it up to 10! :) . Alternatively, why not go for Peds with Pin-Heads. Just make the number a fraction (0.4). CTRL+3 to activate in cheat mode.

// Powerup 20: Pinball mode!

// Floating point param #1 (collision energy factor) Default=3.0
Increase this to about 6.0 for SUPER PINBALL mode! (ped bouncing is more satisfying!). ALT+0 to activate in cheat mode.

Ped SUPER CHUNK Blood Patch

I've played around with Carma over the last few days, and the results of my work are 2 super blood chunk patches for Carmageddon II.

Download both Zip files, each one individually replaces settings.txt in the data/peds/ folder.

DONT FORGET to make a backup copy of the original settings.txt.

The Super Blood Chunk pack is fairly o.t.t and satisfying for normal play. However, the "Chunk Tardis" pack really excels in long distance replays.

More to come over the next few weeks..........