Gourmet Carmageddon

Hello,

I'll make this one kinda short. There's a way to have full lit colors and textures on your peds, cars, noncars, etc. even though you can't use the track full-lit trick. The idea is to use a material/texture from the REG folder! In order to achieve that, you have to create a reference to this external MAT file within the model DAT file only (and thus no entry in the normal car MAT file).

Usually working in PT2, when you save your car/ped, PT2 creates/updates the MAT file to make it include all the materials in use on said model. If you happen to want a full bright yellow color on some part, here's what you'll do:
C2 includes SimpMats (if you're an advanced modder you should know that) and one of them is a full bright yellow, M38.MAT. So in PT2, create a new empty material named M38.MAT (flags and the likes doesn't matter at all, we just need the exact material name) and then assign it to the triangles you want. Save your model, PT2 creates/updates the MAT file. This car MAT file includes M38.MAT and this is bad as we want the game to use the external one (from the REG folder uh (it's inside simpmat.mat which is loaded automaticaly)). So open up your car MAT file with a hex editor, find the M38.MAT entry and delete it (correctly). And voila, your car will now use the generic M38 material which will render full lit ingame.

Ofcourse so far this shows limited uses, only full lit colors. You can still achieve very interesting design touches though. As example look there Coffeycup's Zenabot is using this trick to have green glowing eyes. They come out very well out of the metalic chrome effect.

But yeah... it's possible to go further. You can put your textures in the REG/PIXELMAP folder (usualy twatted though) and create a specific MAT file for them all. The main difference with the SimpMat.mat is that you can have other lighting settings than full lit (setup via PT2), not sure about diffuse colors. Once again referencing the external material in the DAT file only (and not in the car/ped mat file) will load the new MAT file from the REG folder. The textures will render ingame as full lit (or as set up) but also unfiltered (might still be dithered though (if flagged)).

You guessed it, it's not very comfortable to use as usualy the REG datas are twatted. Still it's an interesting feature for modders working on total convertions. Also I'm positive it should be possible to hack the main C2 executable to make it load other TWT files (and thus addon ressources).

Well anyway... seriously I could use these SimpMats for a million things. And so do you.