Offline Racing & AI Selection

GertjanD · Nov 29, 2021

BoothJoe said: ↑

This is a short recipe for making your own offline RaceEvent with custom skins, custom drivers, custom tracklist and custom AI skills. I use these steps to create an offline, solo 1991 championship season with my own AI drivers and skins. I use LogAnalyzer to manage the championship season. If this is too long or convoluted, I can delete it upon request. Or one of the mods can hack and slash at will.

The short howto is this:
1. Select a car from a mod that you will use as the master for all of your cars
2. Create a skin for it
3. "Load" the skin in RF2 Tuning garage
4. Create the new AI driver
5. Edit the new AI driver's skills
6. Using the MAS2 program, create a new mod/rfcmp.
6a. Add the tracks you want
6b. Add the car from step 1
6c. Add addons such as commentary, tires, etc.
6d. Save the rfcmp file
7. Install the rfcmp file in RF2
8. In the Series menu, choose the RaceEvent you created.
9. Adjust session settings.
10. Race

More detailed description.

I am going to create a RaceEvent called 1991 ASR F1 Classic using the Ferrari 643 car mod from ASR. To keep the explanation simple, I'm only going to use this
one car and I'm going to create four drivers who will drive a version of his car. The ASR 1991 mod for the Ferrari comes with two drivers, Prost in car 27 and Alesi.
We will use Prost's 27 car as a master to create new skins and drivers.

Go into RF2 and select Prost's car from the ASR mod. Then click the Tuning button, which takes us into the garage. Here, go to the Car Paint area and select Create Directory. This will create a master directory for that car in rFactor 2\UserData\player\Settings\ASR_OWC_643_1991 called 643_27. In there will be a dds file that is the skin for Prost's car. You can use Photoshop to open that file and make some simple changes to the car. I used the clone tool to eliminate the stock logos and cut and pasted logos from the internet to create my own skins. I was also able to change colors using the paint bucket tool. Some mod makers will provide you with templates for the cars and this can make working in Photoshop a lot better. The ASR mod makers don't provide the templates so the dds files will have to do. See tutorials on skinning to learn how this is done in detail, but whether you use the dds files or templates, you will need the Nvidia dds plugin for Photoshop.

Create four different skins...one for each AI driver you will create...and place the files in the 643_27 folder mentioned above. Remember that the letters "alt" must be somewhere in the filename for the file to be recognized.

Go back into RF2, select Prost's #27 car and click Tuning to get back into the garage. This time, go to the paint area and observe the line Variants < > 643_27.alt. Click the < or > and cycle through the skin files you created. Select one and click the Create New Car/Driver button. A new dialog box will open and you can give provide a name for the driver of this car, a team, a car number and a description (the description will be used to identify the car in later menus so make sure it is something that will help you understand which car it is. For example, you create a Ferrari #69 car to be driven by Dirk Digler. Set the description to be something like "Digler Ferrari 69." Before moving on to the next car and driver you can edit the AI for the driver and set various parameters by clicking the Edit AI button.

Create new AI cars by cycling through your skins on the Variants line. Assign a driver to each. Let's say you create Digler as well as Jack Horner, Buck Swope and
Amber Waves.

You're now done creating the cars and drivers for your RaceEvent. If you go into the rFactor2\UserData\player\Settings\ASR_OWC_643_1991 folder you'll see separate directories for Dirk Digler, Jack Horner, Buck Swope and Amber Waves. If you editied the AI files for each, you'll see rcd files...0.rcd, 1.rcd, 2.rcd and 3.rcd. The rcd files are text files containing the edited AI information for each driver.

Now it's time to create the RaceEvent. Start the MAS2 editor located in the rFactor 2\Support\tools directory of RF2. When it loads, click the toolbar icon that looks like a file cabinet. It is called Set Packages Directory. Point this to the location of your packages directory...rFactor 2\Packages. To create a new package, click the toolbar icon that looks like a donut box amd select Create New Mod Package. After a few long moments, a new dialog box will open where you can put in the name of your new mod. We're calling our mod 1991 ASR F1 Classic, so type that in the Mod Name box.

Click Next and you will be taken to a new dialog box where you can choose the tracks you will use in your series. Hold down the control key and select the track you want to include and then click Next. The next dialog box opens the car selection menu. Here you would select the ASR_OWC_643_1991 because that is the only car we plan to use in our series. The next window allows you to select some additional components; select the ones you want and click Done.

Now you go to a new window that shows the tracks, car and components. First, the Package box may need adjustment. If you see a red block after the name, click the file cabinet icon and make sure the Packages directory is listed and the name of your mod is in the File name box. Click the Open button here to save the rfmod file. Back at the main screen you'll notice that there are blank check boxes next to the tracks and cars in the left pane. The right panes will have each track layout and each driver checked. The point of these panes is to allow you to build the tracks and cars into the package or to just reference installed tracks and cars in RF2. Obviously using the references makes for a smaller package file than incorporating the tracks/cars into the package. If you filter the tracks and drivers down to what you will absolutely need for your series, it will save you clicks later on when you run RF2.

Let's say I selected Silverstone. Silverstone will be unchecked in the left panel and the layouts for Silverstone will be checked in the right pane. Since I'm only interested in running the GP layout, make sure that is the only one checked. Moving down to the drivers, remember that we used Prost's #27 car as our master to create or AI drivers. So make sure only Prost's car is selected. Once you're happy, click the Package button and the package should build in your packages directory. It will give you a success message when it completes. There is a help file included in the Support\Tools directory that fully explains how to use the MAS2 editor.

Once the package is successfully built, restart RF2 and install the package in the normal manner from the main RF2 memu.

Now it's time to run the RaceEvent you just created. Start RF2 and click on the Series button. Select the 1991 ASR F1 Classic RaceEvent you just created.
The next step is to make a session adjustment. Go into Session Settings and change the number of AI. In this document, we created four new cars/drivers. RF2 will ALWAYS include the original drivers in the field. So if you were to put 4 in the AI drivers field, you would see Prost and only three of the drivers you created. You need to enter 5 here (Prost plus your four AI drivers).

When you start the race, you'll notice in the Standings screen that Prost, Digler, Horner, Waves and Swope are listed. To eliminate Prost, click his name and click the Boot button. Now you will have a race field that includes only the cars/drivers you created. Every time you start a new session, you will need to Boot the original drivers. If you do a Practice, Qualify and Race, you
only need to do it for practice; it will carry over to the qualify and race.
Click to expand...

How do you do step 5 in the new UI, ie edit the new AI drivers skills?

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