Question about MAS Utility and Virtual Rides

[Slowdive]

I've created a number of virtual rides to form an offline championship and I wanted to create a custom package that would only include those cars and not the defaults for the car type. However, when I go into MAS, under Teams, only the default cars show and no new virtual rides that I've created show. Is there a way to get them in or a simple way to only select the custom AI that I've created for the championship when selecting opponents before a race? I know about going in and manually adding them from within the race, but that seems pretty tedious to do every time and is prone to mistakes.

RF2 has such great potential but good lord it is a pain to work with and do something that should be really simple.

 

[Booth.the.doberman]

I just did this with the new endurance cars. Here is what I did in a brief outline.
There are a bunch of steps and I could have done things I did not need to do, but I'll report here what worked for me.
First I used the Mas editor and extracted the .veh and .dds files from the supplied Oreca car-upgrade.mas. I extracted these to a work folder.
I opened each dds file in The Gimp and changed the color of the car with the paint bucket tool and used the text tool to replace the stock numbers with my own. I created two dds files for each of the stock cars (seven were provided for the orecas). Each of the dds files were named Oreca#xx-alt.dds with xx being the number of the car.
I then made a copy of each of the seven veh files. This gave me 14 veh files for the 14 drivers I was creating. I opened each veh file and changed the name, car number, team name and dds file.
At this point, my work folder contained 14 dds files and 14 veh files. I created a new mas file with the same name as the one provided (car-update.mas and was version 1.09). I then created a single component in the mas editor and pointed it to my new car-update.mas. I gave it version 1.10 and told it to update version 1.09. I built the file and installed it from the mas editor. At this point in the RF2 launcher in the package section, I could see my version installed along with the 1.09 version. Now, when I run these cars and go to the Session Setup screen and select 13 AI, RF2 will select the new cars I created (plus one is mine to equal 14). In the Choose Car screen, I now see only my created drivers in the list. Note that if I choose 15 AI in the Session Setup screen, it will grab a fictitious name for that one.
Now I wanted to set up a separate Series. So I did the standard series setup process in the mas editor. I created a new package, chose my tracks. When I went to select the cars, the new cars I set up showed up in the list. I believe it does this because I updated the original version to my 1.10 version so it knew those cars existed.
I am going to say something now that I THINK is true, but I'm not sure. When you choose the cars while building a package, you can check the boxes for each car in the right pane. When you do this, I believe it loads those cars directly into the package. If you don't add them individually, I think the game calls them indirectly. I THINK this matters if the cars get an official update. I BELIEVE if you load the cars directly, they will stay as part of the package and will not be automatically be replaced by the new updated cars.
Once everything was to my liking, I built my series package and installed it from the Mas editor. When I go to the Series, it loads my new cars, and I'm happy.
I named all my AI drivers after famous authors, by the way, so I'm racing against Hunter S Thompson and James Joyce, et.al.
For completeness, I also did the same thing to the Normas (new veh and dds files) and I named them after American presidents. I added them to the series and I also added the Porsches to the series although I didn't mess with them...they are just racing fodder.
So in the end, I have a series where I have 14 Orecas driven by authors, 12 Normas driven by U.S. presidents and six Porsches driven by generic named drivers. My session setup says to use 31 AI (remember to subtract your car from the total).

 

[Slowdive]

Wow. First off, thank you for that detailed response.

I was afraid of that though. I actually did exactly the same thing you did with the Endurance DLC, but I thought I was doing it wrong. So I was trying this method with the Virtual Rides. I think our long convoluted method works better, although it's harder to make changes. You addressed one of my concerns, that the car would never get updated. Would be nice to know if your method works for sure.

It's amazing to me that they can't just allow you to tag each virtual ride, for example ED-GTE, ED-LMP2, etc. or something like that and then you could just select that group in the opponents window. But that would be too easy and then everyone would play RF2. Wouldn't want that.

 

[Booth.the.doberman]

I think it sounds worse than it really is. I found it an interesting challenge to get it to work, so I didn't mind the work at all. And it's not like it's tedious; its just a bunch of steps. I've asked before for the whole virtual ride thing to be made easier as well as to have a customized list of drivers from which the game would draw instead of the built-in ones. I think the most important thing I learned when working with creating your own package from an existing one is that you have to update the existing package if you want to see your new cars/drivers. So when creating the package, you have to give it the same name and you have to check the Update From box and put in the version of the one you're updating. I am not sure what happens when the cars get an official update from the workshop though.

I had to redo my package last night because I noticed one of the dds files for one of the cars was bad. In the process, I learned I had given some incorrect information. When you're building the package, there's a place where you will have left and right panes. The left pane will list something like the Oreca cars and the right pane will have the names of the drivers. If you check the boxes in the LEFT pane, that will build that stuff directly into the package. I think this means that an official car update will not affect your package because all that info is contained within your package.

 

[Slowdive]

Well it took me several hours to figure out how to do it, so the average user is probably not going to stick with it. Also, I actually named my new package differently as I didn't mind if the originals went away. I suppose this could be bad for multiplayer, but I usually just use RF2 offline.

Also, one other gotcha is that I noticed if you try to create a virtual ride with another car for example, with a driver name the same as one from your new modified package, for me at least, it wouldn't work and the new Virtual Ride driver never shows up.

I probably should go back and rename my package as you have to be in-line with the existing one. I'm just wondering though if you only increment the version .1 and then they release the next version if it will overwrite your package.

 

[Booth.the.doberman]

The name thing with virtual rides has been reported in the past. It drove me nuts when I got the Endurance pack and tried to set it up and it wouldn't work because I had the same name in a USF2000 series I had set up.

I believe if you have updated version 1.0 to a new personal version 1.1 and they come out with a 1.2 version that it will overwrite/replace yours. After all, when I updated 1.0 to 1.1, the 1.0 drivers no longer existed. I think, though, that if you save the 1.1 drivers into the package when you create it, that they become part of that package and will not get updated.

 

[Slowdive]

Interesting. I'll give that a try then. Thanks!