SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Review: Grand Prix Legends 2004

GPL has seven slots available for cars, but the ingenious editors have found numerous ways to work around this limit and add little specialities. So while you can drive one of the seven 67-cars e.g. the Eagle, you´ll have Bruce McLaren driving a red car, like he did in ´67. Want to add Silvio Moser? Guy Ligier? Just search for it on RaceSimCentral or ask in the GPL forum there.

The seven cars are stored in GPL´s cars67 directory, so in order to switch between carsets, you need some basic utilities like GEM+2 or Carset Changer which switches everything in and out for you.

GEM+2 is the only switching utility you'll need if you only want to run the 1967 cars or the 1965 mod. The coming 1969 mod will also be supported by GEM+2.

It let's you switch the layout files, the car files, physics and sound files without you having to worry how it's done. It happens at the click of a button. You can even adjust the speed of the AI with this utility / editor.

The Carset Changer is a slightly older carset manager, but if you should wish to try out the graphical updates that make up the 1966, 1968 and 1969 carsets, you can use Carset Changer, which incidentally is included when you download the 1968 carset.

As implied by the term "carset" the '66, 68, and '69 carsets currently use the stock 1967 physics.

A word of caution though — you should familiarize yourself with the GPL folder structure and the way Carset Changer works before attempting to install it. It's not too complicated, but it's not quite a no-brainer either.

Tracks Management

All tracks are stored by GPL in one "tracks" folder and are being controlled from a "season.ini" file residing in the "seasons" folder. The season.ini file holds information on what tracks you have installed.

As such, you can drive any car at any track as long as it is listed correctly in the season.ini. Most add-on tracks come with a self-installer that takes care of all the .ini files so you won't have to worry about that.

Future versions of GEM+2 will also let you manipulate season.ini files so you could have the tracks relating to the 67 season in the 67season.ini, tracks concerning the 65 season in a 65season.ini and tracks used in 1969 in a 69season.ini. Until GEM+2 supports this feature you can manually edit the season.ini´s using Notepad.

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