Carmageddon

 

Vice to Carma
history

I don't think I will have to explain where the name came from and what it means. Since February 2009 I've been working on porting the models from the game GTA Vice City, developed by Rockstar, to the Carmageddon 2 engine, by stainless. The idea has been around on the net for allmost 5 years now. Back in 2004 I read a news item on The Welch way by Errol, who was investigating the models of the game in order to port them. That Idea allways sounded aweome to me, but until today it still hasn't been realized.

Then in June 2007 Cesm was posting on CFE about a GTA3 to Carmageddon project. I was again thrilled! Weird thoug that I started to do the exact opposite, because I was starting with modding GTA San Andreas and the Idea of Grandcarma was born. (Check the GTA Section) This project has kept me busy till December 2008, 1.5 years! geez... time flies!

After the Auto Installer release of Grandcarma I was in desperate need of a different project. That is when I thought of Cesm's project. Because he is still wanting to work on it I decided to port Vice city. And there we go, a project idea developed in 2004 is getting realized in 2009!

features

The conversion of the map will have to be done in parts because of the limits of the Carmageddon 2 engine. The engine can handle at most 500 different texture files, and has a pleasant loading time when the polygon count is kept below 100.000. A little more is possible, but for this project I want to keep it as low as possible. I will be using polygon reduction tools suchs as the pro-optimize function in 3d-studio max. Manual reduction is needed for the texture file redution. Textures that have simmilar appeal but not much diffence, will be getting the same file. This way, in an example track, I was able to reduce the texture count from 780 to 403! Tha is allmost half the textures, and it still looked really good!

All textures have to be renamed to 14 characters, or the engine will not load them. A lot of the textues had longer names, so I scripted a texture renaming script that would do this automatically. Still, some duplicate names had to be done manually, but that was about 5% of the textures and vey quickly done. I'm speeking in the past tense here, because at this moment all textures have been renamed. (over 10000!)

In order to make things work, the map will have to be split in different tracks, Each with a maximum of 100.000 poly's and 500 textures. This results in a number of 9 tracks.

Each track will have it's own atmosphere, ranging from a very sunny beach area to a little more rainy indusrial area. In 3d the tracks look following;

All moving objects will be converted to the right format for Carmageddon 2; noncars. Some of these will have a special attribute, a smashable spec. For example; The lantarnposts will spark electricity when they are run over. Fire Hydrants will spray water up in the air, and mailboxes will throw paper in the air when they are hit. Cesm has offered to help out on this part, or even do a large part of this in my turn. Because he is also busy with other projects, I will do a part of it as a basis for my tracks. Currently I have a nice collection of noncars, in total 78!