The Ultimate Stunts track editor (ustuntstrackedit)

Introduction

The Ultimate Stunts track editor will allow you to make new tracks and edit existing tracks. Currently (version 0.7.0), the track editor is still very limited: it is only possible to place/remove tiles on the track, and to import tracks from the original Stunts game.

Usage

Currently, the user interface is still quite simple. In the main window, there is a 3D view of the track, the name of the track on top of it, and a menu on the left. The menu can be used with the mouse. For moving around in the 3D view, the following controls can be used: The "cursor" position is visible as the position of the blinking tile. The vertical column of tiles on the cursor position is also visible as a white box of lines:

Track editing

The "blinking" of the cursor shows two states of the track: the current state, and what it will look like when you press the Enter key. Sometimes there will be no difference, and in those cases, you won't see the blinking. The default edit mode is to insert individual tiles (in fact, it's the only edit mode in version 0.7.0). So, when you press Enter, the selected tile is inserted on the cursor position. Any existing tile on that position will be removed in the action. The following keys can be used: Currently, the available set of tile models is limited by the selection of tiles that is already used in the track. Also, the sizes of the track cannot be changed, route information cannot be changed, and environment settings (background, lighting etc.) cannot be edited. Currently, all those things need to be done manually.

Importing Stunts tracks

One of the options in the track editor menu is to import a track from the original "Stunts" (4D Sports Driving) game. The first thing you have to do is to enter the directory where the Stunts tracks are. This is an absolute path, so it is not relative to the Ultimate Stunts data dir. The "." directory is the directory from where the track editor is started. In the future, this question will probably be replaced with a more user-friendly directory browser. After you selected the right directory, you can just click on a track file, and it will be imported.

Configuring the Stunts import function

The Stunts import function can be configured by modifying a file that is located in the Ultimate Stunts data directory: misc/trackedit.conf. In this configuration file, almost the entire track import process can be customized with the variables in the [trkimport] section. This import process has the following steps:
1: Load a template track
Ultimate Stunts loads an ordinary Ultimate Stunts track file, which will act as a starting point for the converted track. This track will be modified later depending on the contents of the .trk file. The filename of this template track can be set with the templatefile variable, for instance:
templatefile = misc/trackedit.template
The template track has to be at least 30*30 tiles wide and long, and at least 2 tiles high, or more, depending on the configuration of the rest of the import process. All the tiles and textures that will ever be used in the rest of the process should be present in the template track. The initial state of the tiles should be a flat, horizontal ground.
2: Load the terrain
next, the terrain and tile item bytes in the .trk file are processed. All the byte values here are hexadecimal values, but without the usual 0x prefix. What happens here, depends first on the terrain: When a terrain byte with the hexadecimal value xy is processed, it is done according to the variable terrain_xy in the conf file. When an item byte with the value pq is processed, it is done according to the variable tile_pq. Finally, for the terrain bytes between 07 and 0a, processing a combination of terrain byte xy and item byte pq is done according to the variable terrain_xy_pq.

All values of the variables terrain_xy, terrain_xy_pq and tile_pq have the same format. This value contains zero or more units of the following form:

x,y,z:tileID/rotation/altitude;
Every of these units causes one tile to be changed. The values x,y,z tell which tile will be changed. tileID/rotation/altitude are the new settings of the tile, with the same meaning as the three values in the track file format. x,y and z are a position relative to the tile that is being processed. x and y are the relative horizontal position in the track, and z is the layer in the track (the vertical position). So, 0,0,0 is the lowest tile on the processed position, 0,0,1 is the second-layer tile on that position, etc.. Positions like 1,0,0 or 0,1,2 are outside the tile that is being processed, but changing them is allowed to support for large tiles.

The "large tile" item values fd, fe and ff are not processed.