Part Upgrades
So many people have asked for more customisation on the cars and I've always wanted to do it as well. The problem is that we are only 2 people and more customisation usually means more artwork is required, as well as code to support it.
Since the very beginning of the series I've always wanted to have visual upgrades, this means people can give their cars their own touch, and alongside the vinyls system, they would be able to make some really cool cars. I decided that I needed to break down each upgrade into parts such that they could be reused on any other car. This in theory makes modelling them a bit harder, as you need to ensure that each part would fit on each car. However I came up with a neat solution for this.
I finally settled on the following new visual upgrades:
The first job was to go through all the existing cars and remove any of these parts, placing them in a file for each part type. This meant I ended up with 7 files containing all the parts that existed on all the other cars. At the same time as removing all these parts, I needed to patch up any of the existing car models to ensure that they looked good without these parts attached.
Once I was happy with the now "bare" looking cars, I opened each type in turn and tidied up all the models so the parts could be placed on any other car. I chose to use a locator system which basically meant that a locator on the car would be where the locator on the part would connect. For some cars I needed to use an override system and specify specific locators to match specific parts, but this wasn't too much work in the end.
the other great thing about this new system is that I can now in theory break them off from the car in a crash to make crashes look cool, and I can also easily add more if I want to.
These screenshots below show all the exhausts, the first image shows all the exhausts and the first two exhausts show the "attachment" location. The second image shows the now bare Aurori Saloon car with the location where the exhaust will attach. These same principle is in place for all the other parts
This system is pretty cool so I decided to create a quick video of it in action to show how the various parts can be tweaked and changed, here is the exterior upgrades part in action. All parts can have their own colour and the decals on the spoilers should transfer between spoilers. The tyre system will be shown in another blog post.
