SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Review: Team Redline's GTP mod for NASCAR Racing 2003 Season

With a professionalism and attention to detail that would become some commercially established developers, Team Redline released their long awaited and highly anticipated mod for Papyrus' NASCAR Racing 2003 Season.

The same day the mod was released, we saw the emergence of a web site, as well as a forum dedicated entirely to the mod. Users with questions or initial problems were answered quickly, and problem reports were used as input to further improve the mod.

At the same time VROC 3 was available for download. This utility supports GTP multiplayer and is hopefully going to be the future for online racing, not only for NASCAR Racing 2003 Season and it's mods, but also, if plans hold up, in future versions GPL and it's mods. As the GTP mod features a changed exe, it is not compatible with the Sierra servers that are usually where online racers meet. Combining all multiplayer activities into one program is a great idea because I'm the non-technical type who prefers to go one place instead of three or more, to go online for some multiplayer action.

Before even downloading and installing the mod, the overall completeness of the whole package, the care and the thought that had clearly been put into this release was very much in evidence and demanded huge respect. Remember that it's a free download and people have spent a great deal of their spare-time making this happen.

Due to unfortunate circumstances the mod was recalled after being available for some 24 hours. The re-release some weeks later was as a version superior to the initial version, apparently the data being used had been corroborated and refined, and the second time round the mod had also been slimmed down a couple of hundred megabytes, removing some car-liveries and tracks because it was felt that someone might potentially get into legal difficulties. Thank goodness we got the mod, I believe that First Racing was helpful towards Team Redline in solving the issues, and I can't begin to believe how intense the stress must have been for Team Redline, as they were faced with those difficulties. The temptation to call it quits must have been there, but fortunately they persevered and I can only I urge you to download the GTP mod if you own a copy of NASCAR Racing 2003 Season; The mod is simply that good, IMO it's the best mod to date for NR 2003.

Team Redline's GTP mod requires NASCAR Racing 2003 Season by Papyrus to run, but apart form that, it comes across as a new sim using the NR 2003 engine as a host. We'll see just how much has changed, and how much is left of the original NASCAR Racing 2003 Season.

The GTP mod features 4 GTP cars from the eighties and early nineties, each car has its own individual physics. Known in the mod as chassis' A, B, C and D you could call them Toyota, Jaguar, Mercedes and Nissan. But we won't do that. With a multitude of brilliant skins that you can download from the net, just look here, to complement the 4 basic skins that come with the mod, you can have so many different GTP- and IMSA- style cars from the mid-eighties to the early nineties represented in this mod, that no one could ask for more.

Included in the mod are new sounds, as well as the Infineon and Watkins Glen tracks, with track.ini's to match the GTP cars. Team Redline have included daytime / nighttime tracks, as well as nighttime transitions between sessions, working headlights of course, and a glance- utility that lets the viewpoint follow the direction of the front wheels (I admit I'm not smart enough to get this to work though — but using TrackIR I now have a better option!). The team has also included a new launcher that works as a front end to adjust and tweak numerous settings, some of which were previously only available to the user by editing ini files in notepad.

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