Smashables - Rear lights

Hmm, an interesting one, and one I also always forget how to do. Well, I've just finished my Interceptor, so I'm making this tutorial as much for my own benefit as for yours.
by LJ

OK, so I'll presume you've got your car made and in the game. You just want to define the smashables on it now.

Right, open up your car's .wam file using Notepad. I suggest you tick "always use this program" so that the .wam files are identified as text files. Also open up CarEd and load your car. Often, you will want your rear lights to smash. This always seemed difficult to me, and different modellers seemed to use different ways to do it. So I found my own way, which works.

You should have 3 textures for your lights: the normal .tif, the broken one, and a texture 4 times the size which has 4 quarters, showing brake / reverse lights. Define all of these in the Component Edit screen of CarEd.

By define, I mean add each texture to the list. Now here is what you must do: you should have each rear light in a different component. I.e. the left light must be a component on it's own (like LLIGHT) and so must the right. You can group these with other components, but DO NOT group the two lights together.

Now, you must take the texture you defined for the normal lights, and define it again, so it appears twice in the list. Then change the name of each one so they are different. For example, for my Interceptor I called one LLITS and one RLITS. Bear in mind that they both have the same texture name (in this case Ntlights).

Apply the two textures to their corresponding components. I.e. put the LLITS texture on the rear left light, and the RLITS texture on the rear right light. Save your car and recompile it (you must get a new texture list - a new .mat file).

Look at the .wam file. Scroll down the file and find the component which has the texture you want to smash. Replace this line:

0 // Number of 'Smash data' entries.

With this (adapt the parts in red to suit your car's texture names):

1 // Number of 'Smash data' entries.
// smashable part #1
LLITS // name of material
Ntlights // pixelmap (texture) to use when intact (Your normal light texture)
1 // Number of levels
0.002 // trigger threshold (default if zero)
0 // flags
// Connotations:
1 // number of possible sounds
4520 // sound ID
1 // Shrapnel count
shards // Shrapnel type
0,0 // Min,max speed towards car
1.0 // Impactee velocity factor
10.0 // Random velocity (max)
2.0 // Random up velocity (max)
0 // Random normal velocity (max)
100.0 // Random spin rate (max)
0.75,1.25 // Min time, Max time
0.005 // Min cut length
0x01 // flags
Ntlitsbrk // name of shrapnel material
0 // Explosion size
none // Slick material
0 // Number of non-cars activated
0 // Radius of side-effect smashes
0 // Extensions flags
0 // Room turn on code
none // Award code
0 // No run-time variable changes
1 // Number of pixelmaps
Ntlitsbrk // pixelmap to use when smashed (Your smashed light texture)

There is only one thing now required to get your rear lights working properly in the game. Open your car's .txt file. Scroll down to where it says "Start of Funk". You will find a placeholder for the rear lights like this:

RLITS
constant
piss off
no fucking lighting bastards
frames
accurate
texturebits
VB
4
Ntlitall,2,0,2,0
Ntlitall,2,1,2,0
Ntlitall,2,0,2,1
Ntlitall,2,1,2,1

Again adapt the parts in red. The first one is the texture name (RLITS or LLITS) and the last 4 are the texture with 4 quarters.

Save your files and put everything into the right place in the carmageddon2 directory. The lights should now work in the game.

Back to Tutorials.