SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Feature: Richard Burns Rally. A Year On.

The Car Installer is a very promising looking new utility that is going to remove the hassle of installing new cars. With a finite amount of slots for cars, you have to replace an existing car every time you wish to add a new car. Until the arrival of the Car Installer I had a second, full copy of my RBR directory in a separate place on my hard-disk and used that to experiment with. The manual procedure of installing new cars would involve opening the "cars.ini" file and editing it in notepad, and then unpacking files with a tool called DATTool. It's available from Blackhole Motorsports. Here's the readme on how to install the Punto 1600 Abarth:

1. Copy the PUNTO_1600_ATR2005 folder in your: ...\SCi Games\Richard Burns Rally\Cars\

2. Open your Cars.ini file (for example with notepad), and replace the [Car02] group lines, with the following:

[Car02]

FileName = "Cars\PUNTO_1600_ATR2005\punto_1600.sgc"

IniFile = "Cars\PUNTO_1600_ATR2005\punto_1600.ini"

ShaderFile = "Cars\PUNTO_1600_ATR2005\punto_1600_shaders.ini"

ShaderSettings = "Cars\PUNTO_1600_ATR2005\punto_1600_shader_settings"

TexturePath = "Cars\PUNTO_1600_ATR2005\TEXTURES\"

3. Copy the Physics folder in your:

...\SCi Games\Richard Burns Rally\

4. Using: DATtool (by Kegetys) Available from Blackhole Motorsports here.

(a.) open/extract the splash.dat file present in your:

...\SCi Games\Richard Burns Rally\Textures\

(b.) insert/copy the new car_2_1024.dds file in the new folder:

...\splash\L#\Rally_7\TargetMedia_Develop\Pc\Debug\World\Textures\Splash\

(c.) and replace the old file, then recompact the splash folder, always using DATtool, in this way you have generated a new file splash.dat.

At this point you could delete the provisional splash folder.

Simple. Huh?!

The Car Installer will make this procedure history. This new tool is a car and skins manager for 26 cars (WRC, GrN, s1600, KC, GrA). At the moment, some of them are not ready yet (Fabia, Celica..) but on future updates more cars will be added. This pack includes all car files, physics, 3D models, ini files, etc.

Luckily, the first thing that happens when you run Car Installer is that your existing files are backed up, so you can just hit the backup button to restore everything to the condition it was in before you started replacing cars, just in case, if anything goes wrong.

The main menu looks like this:

RBR Car Manager

Clicking on the button marked "Open skins folder" you can see the structure of folders for skins:

Skins Folders

In this case, there are skin textures for the Lancia Delta 1992 so it should be safe to install this car and these skins. Some skin folders are empty though, and as I mentioned earlier, not all cars are yet available. I'd advise a bit of caution and taking a peek in the folders before attempting to install things. If the window below the Open skins folder only contains a .bat line it is safe to assume that that skin folder is empty.

SkinTextures

I just had to test this, and this is the result of pushing those few buttons!

As far as I can tell, this installer works perfectly. Not only was I able to install the Lancia Delta 1992 with correct textures to the game, I also experienced no problems in reverting back to my original configuration with the correct physics and car for the carslot. The Toyota Corolla was back after hitting the backup button in the restore section. Absolutely marvelous!

You can download the Car Installer v1.0 here from Blackhole Motorsports.

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