GPW Livery Development Tutorial v1.1
Version history
March 24 2006 (v1.0)
April 17 2006 (v1.1)
- What we need Section edited.
- Technical background Section added.
- Section Step 1 – Gathering pictures of our preferred car edited.
- Section Step 2 – Getting a template to work with replaced with The livery file section.
- Section Step 3 – Painting top and side view renamed to Step 2 – Painting the livery.
- Section Step 4 – Creating a livery file and loading into GPW replaced with Step 3 – Testing section.
What we need
- Obviously a 2D art authoring tool. Newcomers to 2D art may want to check The Gimp, an open source application.
- A graphics conversion tool (if your preferred app doesn’t supports .ppm files). IrfanView can do the job and is freeware.
- An hex editor program. You may want to check XVI32 (freeware).
- Pictures of the car we will try to paint. F1 Team’s web sites may be a good place to start searching.
- Optional - a template:template.bmp
Technical background
This information has been copied verbatim from Jork Wierdsma GPW Patch program help file:
"There are four texture files for each team:
- .\car\*.ppm
- .\textbl\*.bmp
- .\textbl\thisyear\*.ppm
- .\textbl\nextyear\*.ppm
The last two files are optional, as they are generated by the game itself and developed from the second file in the list. However you may wish to include copies to pre-develop these files for the game.
All texture image files are 256 pixels wide and 256 pixels high, 16 bit, .ppm files in 72dpi and .bmp files in 96dpi. .ppm files should be saved in binary form and file comments should end 30 bytes into the file (you will need a hexadecimal (hex) editor to check this). For instance, the way Jasc Paint Shop Pro 6 (PSP6) saves .ppm files is compatible for the game. Users of PSP7 or higher may find that two bytes too many are added into the header of the file, making the file incompatible with the game. It is suggested that these two bytes be removed (typically it is the “ 7” (space seven) added onto the file comment “# Created by Paint Shop Pro 7” that produces the incompatibility issue.
Important: There is one exception to this rule. The texture file in the .\car directory (XXXtexm2.ppm) for the fourth positioned team (in the original configuration this would be McLaren or the file mcltexm2.ppm) should contain the two extra bytes added by PSP7. Typically this fault is indicated if the texture in the game if all the hues appear altered from the original. The texture files in the .\textbl\thisyear or .\textbl\nextyear directories for the same team are not affected by this issue (the two extra bytes should be removed, as like the files for the other teams)."
The livery file
The template provided may help us identify each part, and to note which is left and right as well.
Step 1 – Gathering pictures of our preferred car
Let’s start having fun searching for car pictures. We need a side and top view of the car. Side views seems easy to find, top views may require more searching.
Super Aguri guys made my day :)
Tip:A google search on our car presentation may give good results (try to use your car name rather than team name).
No more searching. I will try to make Super Aguri SA05 car livery. Did you found you favorite car pictures? I hope so. Let’s go on. ;)
Step 2 – Painting the livery
Ok, this is the tough one. We may start painting top and side view. We may erase from the template everything else to have a better view when testing.
Some clicks here and there and here we are:
Tip: Sometimes it gets difficult to deal with existing brand logos on livery. Maybe a visit to brandsoftheworld may help us ;)
Step 3 – Testing
We are at the beginning of the end! Let’s save our livery to .bmp format (and set it's resolution to 96 ppm if we didn't yet), and copy it to \textbl folder (please remember to make a backup before overwriting a GPW file).
We need to name our file so GPW links it to our team. This is a hassle (for me), but one of jordan23jordan’s post at simracingwold.com forums left it pretty clear.
| Team Slot |
File Name |
| 1 |
wil_bl.bmp |
| 2 |
fer_bl.bmp |
| 3 |
ben_bl.bmp |
| 4 |
mcl_bl.bmp |
| 5 |
jor_bl.bmp |
| 6 |
pro_bl.bmp |
| 7 |
sau_bl.bmp |
| 8 |
arrtexm2.ppm |
| 9 |
arr_bl.bmp |
| 10 |
tyr_bl.bmp |
| 11 |
min_bl.bmp |
I would recommend to start a new game, select our team, head to Commercial: Sponsors screen and select 1999 summary tab.
We will capture the screen in order to do as much work as possible between each test. To do so at any time pressing PtrScrn will copy the image on screen to the clipboard. Then we can paste in our 2D art tool.
Tip: You may want to capture a video instead of an image. There are many aps to do so, I would recommend Fraps and VirtualDub. As you may already know Virtualdub Zoom options are rather limited, to copy any given frame press ctrl+1 and then pasting in art tool.
Not a bad start I guess.
Finishing the livery
From now on it’s a matter of painting amd testing over and over until we feel satisfied with our work.
Here it is where I stopped:
Super Aguri SA05:
SA05 Livery file
Thanks for reading this tutorial! If you found it useful (or confusing, or if you found an error), let me know! You can reach me at boost at boostnetwork.net
