Gen Strings

Gen strings are a useful tool to force certain cars to use different parts, without using upgrades.

Glossary

Gen - This is the file the game looks at when it loads the car graphics.

Spinner gen - This is the file the game looks at when it loads your car in the showroom. For genstrings, it's the same as the normal gen.

VEH - This is the file that defines everything you need to load the car, on a per team basis. Usually most information is the same between VEH files.

Gen file

To start with, you'll need:

<STARTUPGRADES>

and

<STOPUPGRADES>

This will tell the game where to look for the files you wish to alter. For this example, we will change the colour of the rims on one car. To do this, we will need two different rim meshes, we'll call them Rim_A and Rim_B. Normally, you would write:

MeshFile=Rim_A.gmt CollTarget=False HATTarget=False LODIn=(0) LODOut=(20) Reflect=True ShadowCaster=(Static, Solid)

This would make rim_A appear, which is fine, but we have another car who wants to be different and use rim_B. Instead of creating a whole new gen file just for that car, we'll use a genstring. A genstring will replace one or more characters that we define in the VEH file, and load them, instead of what we've written in the gen. Let's change the line above to:

MeshFile=Rim_<1>.gmt CollTarget=False HATTarget=False LODIn=(0) LODOut=(20) Reflect=True ShadowCaster=(Static, Solid)

That looks slightly different. We've now replaced A with <1>. This means whatever we write in the VEH files Genstring= section will replace <1>.

VEH file

Inside the VEH file, you have the line Genstring=. To use this with our above example, you would write Genstring=A. This would make the game load Rim_A.gmt. If we wanted Rim_B, we would do Genstring=B. Pretty neat. You can add more to the string, each character in it represents one digit, so you can have, for example, Rim_<12>.gmt in the gen file, and in the VEH you could have Genstring=EH, which would now load Rim_EH.gmt. You could also have Rim_<5>.gmt in the gen file, and in the VEH you could have Genstring=HELLO, which would make you load Rim_O.gmt, since we've told the game to look for the fifth character in the genstring.