This was about 4 months ago and since then McNolo has continued work on the track with our blessing. This will be more than a conversion as he is also updating the track to 2012/2013 specs. In this time he posted regularly work-in-progress screenshots. Among them are these:

To follow McNolo’s progress and the newest screenshots, we suggest to follow him on twitter or flattr him if you like his work.

We should note, while McNolo has our permission, CTDP is not involved in the project, but we have the feeling, the track is in good hands. Good luck!

We will show more WIPs when they arrive.

We feel in a stalemate situation at the moment. As we wrote a couple of months ago, CTDP has had some hard years and we have awaited rFactor2 with high hopes. To boost morale in the team, we pushed the developed of the IFM-2009 mod forward in favor of F1-1994. We had to adjust and get results with less people, and a smaller mod such as IFM-2009 was just the way to go. rFactor 2 Beta was released in January and looking back on the past months, we realized, many of our hopes have yet to be fullfiled. Beta means rFactor2 is not stable and in a constant change. This is software, this is normal, however, this has consequences on the community and on the modders in particular. For us it feels like the community has been holding it’s breath since the first release of rF2. Very few leagues switch and embrace the new platform, even fewer mod teams. And we can understand this, as CTDP is also experiencing the disadvantages of being cutting edge: sometimes you cut yourself. We discovered several bugs in export tools and shaders, we have been embracing the new platform and sometimes we had setbacks and wrong decisions. That’s alright, however what makes it frustrating is, that even after 10 months it feels like developing against a moving target. Software is supposed to evolve and change, but especially interfaces to external components (ie exporters, shaders, physics, packaging) need to be frozen at one point to allow for third-party devs to get things done and build upon it. This has not happened yet and every new build requires to update things on our current alpha of the IFM2009 mod and reexporting the models. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worst. Bleeding edge.

While the community held its breath waiting, modding within CTDP appears to suffocate. We have all but one car textures ready. 15 helmets are left to do and no texture artist is motivated to work on it. We have basic physics who need work especially on the tire model, which is its very own story with rFactor2. We have a running alpha version, and no testers who provide solid and helpful feedback. We are down to a handful of people and not sure what to wait for right now.
We are considering other platforms, but right now there is no alternative available/suitable to us.

We are still innovative and full of ideas. We have better tools and utilities for modding than ever before. If we had the same means 4 years ago when we were working on F1-2006, I would shed tears of joy. Still all the tools don’t help it if modding is not enjoyable. And right now it isn’t and we don’t know what we can do to help it.

This tool is to visualize the projected memory usage of all DDS-texture files you have in your Mod’s folders. This helps to find textures that are very big or in wrong compression. You can see what kind of texture’s require which amount of space and you can get additional information by hovering over the area.

As all of my DDS-utilities it’s available as  Java-Webstart on or website without installation.
Source code is available under GPLv2 on github.

But are there still people out there that have a non-adjustable wheel like the good old Logitech Momo Force? Those wheels have a rather small steering range of around 270°. We would need to create some sort of fallback for these users as with the intended steering lock they would get a wrong steering ratio and thus not the intended feeling while steering.

To check if your wheel is adjustable just go into the device settings page and check if there is a slider or something to adjust the steering range. To measure your wheels lock you can turn your wheel to one side till it stops. If it’s upside-down then that would be 180°. Double that and you’ll get your steering lock.

So tell us what kind of wheel you’re using. You don’t have to be registered to vote. Also feel free to add a comment with more detailed information if you like.

Since our open letter, we got a new designer, we welcome Neil to the team, who immediately began work on the helmets.
And helmets we need, as we have roughly 1/5th finished and many remain to be done.

For the cars the situation is much better. Dahie has been reviewing all textures and created the export scripts. We find small issues every now and then, collect and fix them. One official team texture hasn’t been finished yet.

The car model itself is done and ready. While shaders may change with future rFactor2 builds, The current look, is quite stable at the moment. Mianiak was working on the driver body (which was based on the shortly released ISI model). We had the first version ingame, but the animation didn’t convince us. The problem was not the animation itself, it was more or less caused by the insufficient rigging/weighting. Somebody within the team pointed out, it would look like the driver has broken wrists. So it didn’t fullfill our expectations and we changed plans. For the initial release we will go for a non animated driver. We will create our complete own driver model including rigging. But this may take a little bit longer. That’s why we’re using the non animated version as place holder.

Pier and Erale are working on the physics. Next to the official car manual erale already had, we got some more specs from Tatuus – the car manufacturer – helping us with some of the missing data. Grip levels, aerodynamics, suspensions are some of the usual suspects, they are trying to figure out at the moment. On a positive node, the car doesn’t spontaneously jump into the air anymore.
We recently started larger physics tests to see, how the mod handles in multiplayer and to get more feedback from users.

Outside of the mod preparations for release began. Note, the release is still a bit away, but preparations are a good way to see what’s missing and can be done easily in parallel. What’s done is done.
As we do with all our mods, we are going release templates for the IFM-2009 and with a high probably before the actual Mod-release. Dahie is working on these, the documentation and a special treat, we won’t reveal just yet.

Regarding the release, we have one big feature missing, which is rather important for a release: Sounds.
We don’t have a sound specialist at the moment and right now we’d be stuck with reusing ISI’s sounds from any of their rF2-mods released so far. We feel this wouldn’t do the mod justice, so we invite people interested and skilled in sound design to help us recreate the real feeling.

That’s it for today.

A little gloassar at the beginning. The surface of a car is not just defined by one graphic, but by multiple maps with different properties which – defined by the material – influence the look of the surface. The regular color texture is also called diffuse map. Height-differences are encoded in the normal-map (bumpmap, if the map is only greyscale). The Reflection map defines how reflective a surface is and the Specular map how much direct light is reflected. Occlusion maps can be described as the shadow applied to a car.

1998 GrandPrix2

Back in the days, when I started, the GP2 community was alive and large. All seasons were available, carsets were updated right after every GP. Lots of choice, lots of differing quality.
Modding was rather simple. GP2 had two car models, which both shared the same texture layout. Modelling consisted for moving points on the model. You had one texture per car with 256×168 pixels resolution and 256 colors.

The simple and blank models the textures made the textures more important, as they were the only means to distinguish – not just by color and logos – but by simulating differences in the car’s shape by clever use of shading and painted details. Barge-Boards and winglets were drawn onto the car, as there was no way to attach them as real 3D objects. Shading defined how low or how high a nose was, or how the shape of the sidepod was supposed to be imagined.

Source

He whose painting tools allowed to do anti-aliased painting with so little color was king. GP2 was never designed to mod, but people reverse engineered the file formats (see inofficial documentation for track editing) Steven Young released his GP2edit, which is an awesome tool for creating carsets including cars, cockpits, performance data and everything you need for a full-season update. Modders could use this tool to create mod packages and have an easy way for racers to install it.

1998 Racing Simulation 2

As RS2 only included fictional textures, they were smart enough to included a small utility to exchange textures.
You had multiple models each simulating one car of the 1997 F1-season, which couldn’t be edited, each with its own mapping and one texture at 256x256px. No way of easy previewing your work, which sucked, as the mapping was horrible and distorting. RS2 was the first Sim inviting Modders, but they did it badly without support.

1999 GrandPrix3

GP3 came with big accolades and it managed to strive on the existing modding community of GP2. Quickly the tools for GP2 were rewritten and released for GP3. So GP3edit quickly became the natural way to edit GP3, distribute full mods or simple textures.
Whereas GP2 had 2 car models, GP3 only had one, which was still as badly to edit as it was for GP2. One model means modders only had to work with one mapping, textures could easily be exchanged between teams. Colors were increased to 24bit, as it is today. This helped to improve the general quality alot, as more people were able to use profesional or semi-profesional graphic tools. Photoshop was still seldom, so became MS Paint. The texture resolution was 256×384. Somebody alone could easily create a full carset within 1-2 months.

Source: Carset F1 1998 by Jan Frischkorn

It was still very common to paint every detail on the car texture and painters never had so much freedom and so much independence in inventing new creative designs and combining them with inventive shapes drawn on the car. Granted it took a lot of imagination and there were big limitations, but sometimes limitations can support creativity, It was alot of hacks, workarounds to create the impression you have the car ingame, that you see on tv. But that’s how we roll, Modders are hackers, too.

2002 GrandPrix 4

GP4 was a small revolution in graphics compared to its predecessors, the GP4 engine turned out to be one of the most-scalable racing engines out there. Even today it holds its rights with models and textures a magnitude more detailed than the original content back in the day. (Original textures: 512×512 today Modders use regularly 2048×2048 and up to 4096×4096 have be successfully tried).
GP4 introduced individual car models for every team (infact with a little hack for every driver). Every model had 3 textures each 512×512 pixels with 32bit colors adding an alpha channel that controls reflections and speculars. With individual UV mappings per car, you weren’t able to switch textures between teams anymore. From here on models and textures were always bound together and could never exist without the other. This ment a very big paradigm shift, because Painters alone very early hit the limits of the GP4 mappings and to continue raising the bar of what Modders can accomplish, the texture designers either had to learn modeling or team up with modelers. Both happened.

Tools like the original ZModeler allowed for easy model modification and preview. Painters could lay hands on models and mapping and learn in a reasonable amount of time the basics to continue. Modelers came and used ZModeler to convert their new models from 3D Studio Max and export it to the game. Collaborative work between Modelers and Painters began and spawned increasing quality in terms of accuracy, level of detail and size.
From here on out, mappers and painters could always decide on their own on the amount and resolution of textures. Textures still contained details like shading, joint lines bolts and small details, but every large object was modeled on the shape.

By now painting meant you had Photoshop and you know how to apply alpha channels to textures to regulate the reflectiveness of the car. You immidiately recognize novice painters by their shiny cars. Many modelers began to release templates for the cars for leagues and fictional cars.
Having a constant game for 10 years has it’s advantages, a rich collection of tools and utilities has developed, that bridges some of the worst obstacles the game throws in the Modders ways.

2003 F1 Challenge

At this point I joined CTDP as working alone become more and more difficult and as Painter you’d need modelers you’d like to work with and trust their quality.
F1C was simpler than GP4, because its architecture was more open and Modders did not have to reengineer alot as many formats were plain text files or common texture formats. It was easy to mod, because of a good seperation of concerns. It became easy to put cars ingame and quick to work in parallel, so Modders formed teams like CTDP, developed to organize and not only release single-cars, but full-season mods. It was also easy to create cars for GP4 and F1C and release them at the same time.

The textures did not have a reflection map, just plain diffuse maps plus a few shader effects. Originally the textures per car were 1x1024x1024 and 1x512x256, but over the years this changed to usually 3x1024x1024 or 1x 2048*2048 per car (we hit the upper limit of the engine with F1-2005). Skins and track liveries were optional, possible to do, but not comfortable. ZModeler was still the 3D utility of choice to export the game and due to its limited capability, this was easy enough for everyone to learn.

2005 rFactor

With rFactor1 came many changes to the workflow of Modders and the relationship of the Painter to the Modeler. The latter getting richer tools like 3D Studio Max, which gave so many more opportunities for advanced and experienced modelers. The bar for novice modelers was raised alot and many couldn’t take it, including myself. We talked about this frequently at CTDP and it gave us alot of headaches, because it was getting harder to recruit people for team. We discussed the more complex workflow required back in 2009.

rFactor increased the paradigm shift. First Painters needed help to create cars, now they are loosing control over the final product not being able to do changes to the cars themselves.This is one step in the loss of control, but it was fine – again rFactor gave many new possibilities skins and track liveries have become easy to do and easy to spent the extra time and effort. Models have different shaders to choose from and in textures that means the Painter has to deal with new normal maps, reflection maps, specular maps. So for every texture on the car you create 5 maps by now. You need to know about the DDS-texture format and how to save your texture properly for the game. The tools were mostly only available for Photoshop on Windows. Combine this with multiple texture per car and multiple skins per team, you really get a huge amount of complexity.

Until 2005 it was common to draw all shading on the car manually. You need shading to improve the contrast of dynamic shading on the car. Also the engine could not do on-car-shading, so this had to be done manually. In 2006 the technique of baking rendered shadows on the car became wide-spread. Painters did not need to paint it themselves any more and just applied the baked shadows to the texture. The job discription changed over the years. Painters have become composers of designs, colors, lines and logos and the composition of effects.

2012 rFactor2

rFactor2 is the new upcoming platform for Modders and a new generation in terms of Modding. Changes like packaging have potential to change the dynamic of a community.
In terms of painting the loss of control is continuing as shaders become the defining factor for nice ingame surfaces. He who controls the shaders controls the look and Painters are support with their work. Multilayer support and possibly Ambient occlusion(SSAO) in shaders are just two – granted cool – additions that may once again increase quality, but also require new expertise by the Painters.

The fields and skills painters are required to have, changed a lot. Technical textures, environmental textures become more important and achieving photo-realistic textures is not something that is learned over night. Also painters have different strengths: might as I try, I can’t do good track textures, I’m only good with car liveries. It’s different techniques, but this is where future painters need to shine and where good people are needed today.

Modding changed alot in the past 15 years. It has become more professional and it’s not supposed to stop changing. But it is worth to stop for a moment, look back, see how far we have come, look around how many other Modders are still with us, see how newcomers struggle and realize how many we have left behind over the years. Modding is no business and it’s not supposed to be. But for a hobby it’ll reach a point where very few people can support it unless we think about how we can decrease complexity and make it easier again by good conventions, awesome tools/software and great documentation.

In every life, there is a point where you have to be honest to yourself and to everybody around you. This point has come now and we (CTDP) want to let you (our fans & followers) know, about our current status. The truth is, after CTDP 2006, a lot of the guys disappeared. In order to compensate the loss, we said CTDP2006 was maybe our most complete mod and will ever be. It was just perfect, it was something nobody has done before and maybe nobody will ever do again. The details and blood, sweat and tears we put into that mod was impressive. Not only to everybody who played the mod. Especially to everybody who was part of the develpment team. But with the release of the mod there was a turning point. Almost four years of develpment demanded its price – and it was very high. While right after the release motivation was high to start new projects, within months we lost many people which caused us to cancel the 2009 mod. Some members quit because they got offers from game developers, some just disappeared and never showed up again, most got job, girlfriend, life.

So what was the next goal to aim for? Our very much awaited 1994 mod should come back to life and should get released at some point. We started the project with our even more limited resources, did a very good research and even built up our own wiki for this season. We were ready to start over, but there is the point we struggled. We thought, it would be enough to give our “old” cars a smart overhaul to get them up to today’s standards, but after had our Wiki and about 5GB of photo material, we discovered, that lots of proportions are wrong and each car has a lot of visible mistakes. Our philosophy turns out as a “neckbraker”. We always wanted to achieve nothing else as the best we can do. And knowing about all the faults it wasn’t good enough for us anymore. So we started fixing the mistakes or even completly redid cars. So far we have 2 cars ready and 3-5 more on a good way. That makes 7 in total, but we’re far from coming even close to a release.

You may ask why?

To answer that question I have to explain what the motivation is the members in CTDP work for.

In a recent comment we were asked if it’s worth the extra time doing all the track specifiy upgrades, liveries etc. for CTDP 2006. That’s a tough question and I think that you can answer it with yes and no. No, because in hindsight it was a huge project that cost us so much time and yes because it’s shows the spirit of CTDP.

The spirit

We are always willing to improve ourself and keep pace with the professional developers in the industry. In case of CTDP 2006 we did something that even professional developers never did before and probably never will: recreate a complete F1 season with every upgrade that was raced during that season. We’ll probably never again create a mod to such an extent but we will always try new ways and technologies in creating our mods.[nbsp] In the end we’re not just modders that create the content, we’re also hackers and gamers. We have certain expectations on how a game/mod should look and feel – like everyone else out there and we work and fight to get the means to do it the way we want it.

Personally if I play a game like Forza, pCARS etc. I look at the graphics – especially the models and textures – and analyze them, to get inspired, to develop new techniques for myself. I wonder how they did this and that and then I try to do something similar to improve my work.

The consequences

The price of the high quality our mods comes in the time and sometimes money spent. Creating more detailed models and textures that look better ingame requires time and skill to create. And to get that skill you need to spend time to practise, improve and experience. To create more realistic physics you again have to invest time and also money to get your hands on books and/or magazines. Creating a mod is much more time consuming than 5 years ago; at least if you go with the time and exhaust all possibilities the engine offers you.

As I wrote above I often take a look at the techniques used in other games or even mods and try to recreate them or even improve them. It’s time that I could have spent in creating another model or whatever. But I think in the end it serves the mod more to create a better looking experience than to release the mod a few weeks earlier with models that look like they were already out of date two years ago.

The consequences – Part II

Our high standards have another negative side effect: it’s hard to find[nbsp] people that have the talent and more importantly the WILL to improve themselves. As every modding group knows members will come and go over time. That’s pretty normal and also understandable – quite often we loose members to the industry. So you’ll try to compensate your losses by recruiting new people. The best thing would be to get someone that[nbsp] already has the skills to work on your level so that you can continue your work without any transition.

As we’re already reached a pretty high quality standard it’s hard to find those people. It’s much more likely that you’ll find some less experienced modders that you’ll have to teach some of the advanced techniques.

I remember back in the days when I started modding with community 3D app that loads in GP2/GP3 models. In this app you can manipulate just the vertics a model had by clicking on it and entering x/y/z co-ordinates. That has tought me the real spirit of modding back in the days and I still remember these days with joy. As for textures, you had your common template and by today’s means you got create a mod within a few weeks.

Modding is constantly evolving and games like rFactor2 will provide us with new[nbsp] features that we want to and should take advantage of. Complexity and difficulty have become harder and where more possibilities were created, the amount of people who is actually able to use them diminishes.

The consequences – Part III

So if you haven’t stopped reading you now know how CTDP ticks, how we define our spirit and what consequences that spirit is asking for.

While we still have talented guys in our rows, it’s not enough. The amount of work for 24 cars is just too much. The IFM mod was a good way to see if we can effort single car mods with just one model and it was a good testing ground for us to get known to rF2 and its new techniques and limitations. So what are our learnings from IFM, if we reduced it to the team work and not to the technical part of the job.

The part of the team that is left, did a great job and we covered almost 80% of our todo’s.

Who is actually part of CTDP right NOW?

• Stefan Triefellner (3D artist, Physics artist, 2D artist)
• James Bendy (2D artist)
• Dennis Schmidt (2D artist) – inactive atm
• Andreas Neidhardt (3D artist)
• Daniel Senff (2D artist, Website) – inactive atm

Volunteers who help us on occasion:

• Michael Borda (ISI)
• Luc Van Camp (ISI)
• Tuttle (3D artist, 2D artist, Physics artist)
• Ben (2D artist)
• radu teo (3D artist)
• AndreasT (Research)

Friends long gone or M.I.A:

• afborro
• Codan
• Gonzo
• Raulungo
• Shaun Stroud
• Paulo
• Ennisfargis
• Roberto Yermo
• Eugenio Faria

What does that mean?

Maybe we have luck and 20 new, talented and well experienced members will join right after that post. But that would be something quite unrealistic to expect and actually not easy to handle as well . So for now, we will focus on IFM and then we will decide IF, HOW & WHEN we continue work on CTDP 1994.

It’s also possible, that IFM is CTDP’s last mod ever released. If CTDP will be gone, we want to see it go in glory and on a highnote, but we will let you know, as soon as we know. It will not be a decision easily made.

Thanks for your attention, patience and your support.

Your CTDP Team (everybody who was & is still part of the team).

Written by
Andreas ‘Neidryder’ Neidhardt

Signed by
Daniel ‘Dahie’ Senff
James ‘Juluka’ Bendy
Pier ‘tuttle’ Murru
Stefan ‘erale’ Triefellner

I published the TGMutils to CTDP’s GitHub. This small library is a TGM parser to read the rFactor2 tgm files and store the data in a Java class. This library can be integrated in your software to import TGM files. This only covers TGM import, TGM export is not implemented. The parser is fully tested using jUnit. At this point this library could be interesting for Java-developers, but not users. I licensed it under at MIT License. So you can use it in your projects, fork it, extend it and make something of it. I’d be very happy.

This tutorial was written for rFactor2 build 60-90, newer builds may behave different and have different processes.

Talking about components and mod packages

Before we get into details how to package your stuff we should talk about the structure in the new packaging system.

So what are MAS, RFCMP and RFMOD files?

• MAS files are some sort of archive where you put your actual files (textures, models, physics etc) in. Think of it like a zip archive.
• RFCMP files are the so called components. A component consists of your actual files stored in those MAS files.
• RFMOD files are can be sort of a container for your components but their main purpose is to install a series. You don’t have to put components into it. You can actually just refer to the components you want to use in yout series.

You may still ask: what is a component and a mod anyway? Look at games like Forza Motorsport and Gran Turismo. You could say they use a similar concept. They also have components and mods. In their case components are the cars and tracks that you can drive. Mods are the championships that the single player career offers you. These championships just need to define which cars are allowed and on what tracks you’re racing.

So different championships (mods) just have to refer on the cars and tracks needed. It’s pretty much the same with rF2 but they divide the components more. For example if you make a car you have the actual vehicle component which defines graphics and physics and components for sounds and talent files. That makes sense as there are some cars out there that share the same engine so you could reuse an existing sound package. For example the IFM has a Honda K20A engine. So if that would already exist we could just use that component with our car.

So when we want to create a series, we create a mod package and just refer to the components we need. In our case there aren’t any sound and vehicle components available so we have to include them. But we will drive on tracks that are already available like Mills, so we don’t have to include them and only have to refer to those components in our mod package.

This is pretty useful if there are modders out there who don’t want to do a complete series but like one specific car. Maybe one day different modders have done so many cars and track components that the community just has to create a small mod file to recreate a specific series by just refering to those existing components.

Before starting the packaging process

When you start to put your files for testing into your ModDev folder be sure to create appropriate folders for your files. For the IFM mod we put our stuff into a folder named IFM2009. Therein we have two other folders: the maps-folder where we put all our models and textures and the teams-folder were we put our *.veh files and driver specific textures. The rest (physics, cam files, gen etc.) lies withing the root of the IFM2009 folder.

For the sounds I like to name the folder different than the folder in the Vehicles directory. We named it IFM2009Engine. Note that your sound component needs to have the same name as the directory your sound files are stored in.

When your mod development hits the stage where you think it should be packaged create a new working directory for the packaging.

Setting up the working directory

So create a new folder. Best would be not to put it into your rF2 folder
Maybe D:\ModPackage or whatever – just DO NOT create this folder within the “rFactor2 Data”-folder as this may cause problems with the manifest-files. Copy the MAS2.exe (from “rFactor Data/Tools” directory) and ModMgr.exe (from “rFactor/Core” directory) files into that folder for easy access and you will need this later.
Create three subfolders called MAS, PACKAGES and COMPONENTS (again, you can choose names freely). There you’ll be saving your MAS, component and mod package files.

Starting MAS2 from this directory will also create an “Installed”-Folder later, which is important for creating the mod package at the end.

Starting the packaging process

Now it’s time to create our MAS files. Open MAS2.exe and drag your files from the maps directory (models and textures) into it, then save it as IFM2009.mas in your new MAS-directory. Create a new mas in the tool, then drag your stuff from the teams folder into it (veh-files and driver specific DDS) and save it as IFM2009_TEAMS.mas.
Next new mas: drag the files from the IFM2009 root dir (physics, gen, etc) into the tool and save it as IFM2009_MAIN.mas. Do the same with the sound files and name it IFM2009_SOUNDS.mas.
The last step would be to create a MAS for your rfm. However, this is not required if you don’t want to create a mod (series) but just a component. In our case we want to create a mod. So drag those three files (rfm and your two dds icons) into your tool and save it as IFM2009_RFM.mas. You can also create a MAS for the talent files and name it IFM2009_TALENTS.mas.

Creating the components

Let’s start with the sound component. “Create a new component” by clicking on the “C” icon in the MAS2.exe tool. Then click on the dropdown list down arrow on the top and select “Add new component”. Name it like the directory your sound files were located in. In our case that was IFM2009Engine. Then click on the file cabinet icon next to the File dropdown list. Navigate to your components subdir in your working folder and name it properly. A good name in our case could be IFM2009Engine_v10.rfcmp as it’s our first version of those files.
You can leave Version at 1.0 and as type chose “Sounds”. No need to check Update from as it’s our first version of that component. Then click the file cabinet icon next to MAS files in the bottom area and add our IFM2009_SOUNDS.mas from our MAS subdir. Click Info to check the meta data you can define within the mod. They are self-explanatory.

Click on Package, then on Install. You now can close the “Create Component” window by clicking on Done. You can now check your working folder and see that the tool created a new subfolder called “Installed”. (This is created in the working directory from which MAS2 was started, preferably in our Packaging-Directory) That’s the same folder structure like in rFactor2. In our case it also created the Sounds folder with our IFM2009Engine->1.0-> and then our MAS file.

Now create the vehicle component. Again click on the “C” icon the create a new component. Click again on “Add new component” and enter a proper name. We call our component IFM2009. Save it as IFM2009_v10.rfcmp in your components subdir and again leave version at 1.0. Do not check “Update from” and choose “Vehicle” as type. Then add your MAS files: these are IFM2009.mas, IFM2009_MAIN.mas and IFM2009_TEAMS.mas. Package your component file and install it.

You can now create another component used for the talent files with the above methods. We currently haven’t got talent files. But you’ll do basically the same as before but as type you need to chose Talent.

That’s it for the component creation.

Creating your mod package

Now we need to create our mod package.

ISI included a new MAS2.exe with build 85 which makes the mod packaging process a bit easier as it guides you through the creation of the package. Click on the P icon in the toolbar and a new window opens. It gives you two options: “Create New Mod” which is some sort of wizard that guides you through the process and “Edit existing mod” which gives you the old packaging window. Probably ISI want us to use the first one to create a new mod and create updates through the second one. I like the old way of packaging stuff as I don’t want to use the RFM.mas that the wizard generates for my mod (also it doesn’t include any graphics for the game UI). So we will start with the old packaging system.

Click on “Edit existing mod”. First thing to do is to get some infos about our mod. Click on the icon next to Select rFM. Choose your MAS that has your rFM stuff included. In our case that’s IFM2009_RFM.mas. You’ll notice that the mod name will be taken from your rFM. I think it’s best to give the mod a proper name in the rFM. Click on the file-cabinett icon next to File on the Package section. Save your package in your package subdir and name it properly using ISI’s naming scheme:

The scheme is: “<Company/ModTeam><ModID>_v<MajorVersion><MinorVersion>_<ModName>.rfmod”.
For us: “CTDPxxx_v10_IFM2009.rfmod”. You can add some infos to your package by clicking on the Info button.

Adding and selecting components

Now you need to add your components to the package. We’ll start with the vehicle and sound components. Click on the little file cabinet icons and a new window will pop up and show you the available components. Select your component and click on OK. Click on the added Vehicles component and you’ll see that it shows you all the teams that are in this component. Select the teams you’ll want in your mod (we want all of them).
(The ISI Mas-Utility has some very bad UI aspects, you select teams and layouts by marking them blue, don’t expect checkboxes, ticks or checkmarks. Also an important note: the tick infront of the component in the list signifies whether or not you want to include this component in the package, or create a reference thereby decreasing the package size.)

Next add your sound component. Click on the file cabinet icon next to the “Other” list field at the bottom and add your sound component.

At last, we want some tracks to drive on. As we haven’t made any tracks we’ll use existing ones. Click on the file cabinet icon next to the location stuff and you’ll notice that the tool won’t offer us any components. That’s because there aren’t any components located in the ModPackage/Installed”-subdir. First create a directory named “Locations” in your Installed subdir then go to your rFactor2-Data/Installed/Locations and copy the tracks that you want to use in your mod into your ModPackage/Installed/Locations folder.

Go back into the MAS2.exe tool and click done to close the create package window and open it again. Then click on the locations icon to add the locations into your package. You may see different versions of a location if it was updated before. In that case just use the version you want to drive on. Select your locations and click on OK. Click on each location and select the layouts that you want to use in your mod like you did with the teams for the vehicle.

Go package

Now we could package our mod. But as we don’t want to include those tracks and inflate the size of our mod package we uncheck “our locations”. That tells the package that we just want a reference on those locations. The user needs those components already installed to drive our mods. We don’t provide those components in our mod package.

Click on Package. A new window will open where you can easily register your mod and get a mod id. Your email and password should already be inserted into the respective fields. You can also include a mod group and click on “Register Now”. The tool then registers your mod and inserts the mod id into your package and creates the rfmod file. You could also just click on “Done” and get a rfmod package but without registering and getting a mod id to drive online.

Click on Install and then on Done. Congratulations, you’ve just created your first rFactor2 mod!

Using the wizard

As of rFactor build 85, the MAS utility got a new wizard to create new Mods more easy. As for the “Create New Mod” option it’s all pretty straight forward. You’ll be asked to enter a name for your mod, then to select the track(s) you want to drive on and finally to select the vehicle and sound components you’ve created. After clicking on “Done” you’ll get the same window as before, but the tool created a RFM.mas for you and already inserted the components based on your decisions. Note, that all components are just a reference and none of them are included in your package. So select the components you want to use (in our case the vehicle and sound components) and make sure the track layouts and teams that you want to include are selected. By default all track layouts and teams are pre-selected.

As already mentioned it’s almost the same as using the old way. You just got an wizard that fills out some stuff for you before getting to that window. Check your info stuff, click on Package (the same mod registering screen will appear) and Install. You’re done.

Other packaging tutorials / Related links

• Packaging tutorial by ISI
• Packaging Video tutorial by ISI
• Virtual Mods Packaging Video tutorial by ISI