RBRCIT - RBR Car Installation Tool

[zissakos]

This tool allows you to easily install new cars (and their NGP physics) before starting the game. It works with a carList.ini file maintained by WorkerBee, which can be updated from the tool with just a click. This file serves as the internal "database" of vehicles. The vehicle model and NGP Physics of each vehicle in this list can be downloaded with just a click.

DOWNLOAD: https://github.com/zissakos/RBRCIT/releases

OVERVIEW VIDEO:

Usage:
- Unzip the "RBRCIT v1.x.x.zip" archive into your RBR root folder!
- Start the RBRCIT.exe

- On startup the tool reads the currently installed cars and shows them in the right panel in gray color. Any change you make will be displayed in black. The "Apply" button will be enabled only if there is at least one change (one black line) in the right panel.

- Choose cars from the list on the left and add them to one of the 8 game slots in the right panel with a double click in the row or click on the (right) arrow button.
*** You can only add vehicles that you have both the model and physics.

- Remove a car from the right panel with either a double click in the row or a click on the (left) arrow button.

- Change the engine sound by either clicking in the "Sound" column of the vehicle or clicking the "Settings" button.
*** In order for this to work, the "audio.dat" file needs to be ectracted into an "Audio" subfolder. This tool can do that for you: on startup the tool will check if this subfolder exist and if not, it will ask you to extract it.

- In the "Settings" (cog button) of a car you can hide parts i.e. Steering Wheel, Wipers or the windshield. This is a per-car setting and will be remembered for the specific car. If you want to always hide some parts, there are parameters in RBRCIT.ini for that.

- When done, hit "Apply".

Check the "Tools" and "Downloads" menus for
- updating the carList.ini file
- downloading missing physics (especially after cars have been
added to the carList.ini)
- Backup & Restore
- Restoring the original RBR cars

SPECIAL THANKS TO:
- Workerbee (for his invaluable support and testing, and all the great past work!!!)
- kegetys (for the dattool)

 

[porridge]

I'm impressed. 5/5. Thank you!

- Extracting audio.dat obviously doesn't work as such but you already know how to fix the pack. When it works it is a really helpful feature for the uninitiated. I know this for a fact because I've met them.

- And so is the possibility of downloading models too... except when a model package happens to be huuuuge. For example, VW Polo R WRC by Alex Racer is something like 500mb extracted (possibly a one-off in fairness), and to finalise the installation the utility froze for 9 minutes, which in porridge minutes is about 9. It is what it is, I presume, but maybe some kind of warning would be in order for the readme, at least.

- Adding cars manually is easy for a pro like porridge, but if you add the proper function for it later, it'd be neat if custom cars were added to a secondary carList.ini - and by that I mean something like "customCarList.ini" - so that any custom car installations wouldn't be wiped out when updating the officially maintained carList.ini.

That is all.

 

[zissakos]

Thanks porridge!

1. There was a wrong subfolder in the zip ("dattool" instead of "bin"). Has been corrected in the download link.
2. Yes, this is something that is not so easy to do: download and extract huge model files. Hopefully this only applies to a very small number of cars... we will see. I can add a warning.
3. I have already thought about that. I am not sure about the best UI though: Should the custom cars just be added to the left table with all the other cars, or should there be 2 tabs on the left side like "carList.ini" and maybe "User Cars"...?

 

[porridge]

[...] 3. I have already thought about that. I am not sure about the best UI though: Should the custom cars just be added to the left table with all the other cars, or should there be 2 tabs on the left side like "carList.ini" and maybe "User Cars"...?

That's a tough one. I had to sleep on it.

Realistically, the need to install extra NGP cars may never be that great at any moment. Obviously it depends on how often WB sees fit to update the carList. Off the top of my head, right now it'd only be about VW Polo WRC 2017, Porsche 911S and Kamaz 4326. And those three would surely sit along nicely among the other cars without another tab.

BUT there's two sides to this, what if someone wanted to use the opportunity to add some non-NGP cars too, albeit with PhysicsNG and thus only for offline purposes? Having tested it, it's not totally unreasonable (uncommon perhaps) and then having another tab would be the way to go.

So what I'm trying to say is that you should go and ask someone else. Because let's face it, I don't use car managers, I have my own all-encompassing solutions. Trust your intuition. Or arrange a poll at GVRC, because here's no good, this place has become porridge's figurative living room. Just don't tell anyone that I voted for another tab, it would skew the outcome like no other. Not a lot of people know this but there's huge animosity between porridge and the Germans. Heck, even I heard of it for the first time while writing that sentence.

 

[WorkerBee]

Porsche 911S has no official NGP physics. I never authorized that.

Basically the plan is to keep the carlist.ini of RBRCIT up to date.
Actually the dropbox link points to MY (the German, pun intended) carlist.ini.
So, you can put your money on WorkerBee updating that list with every new NGP car built.
Then trying out a newly released NGP car just requires a mouse click to update the local carlist.ini on your machine.
Et voilà, you can put the new car into the slot you want.

If you put a car into slot 5 (=Subaru '03), you may drive all rally school lessons with it.

About the long download time. Well, actually the download only takes about 2 minutes (93MB), but the extraction of the archive seems to take quite a long time.
For the Polo I had to wait about 10 minutes.
Don't think that we can make this faster. And cancelling the extraction, or better say, let the user do it, may be no good idea I guess.

 

[porridge]

@zissakos, I don't know about you but for me clicking Hyundai i20 WRC 2014's model download link (the only one with no direct download) crashes RBRCIT.

Without going into detail about this Polo WRC thing but I did some further testing on carefully selected models and I'd be loudly confident it really is an isolated case, a true one-off. Fortunately. So no warnings required, I don't think. Maybe for that car alone the same kind of procedure than with the aforementioned i20 would suffice.

 

[WorkerBee]

The i20 2014 deliberately has no download link due to the model creator being a bit peculiar about distributing his models ...
But RBRCIT is supposed to handle this case gracefully. A small bugfix for sure will do the trick.

 

[zissakos]

fixed.
by the way, the source code can be found in:
https://github.com/zissakos/RBRCIT

 

[zissakos]

I did a shor overview video. Updated OP.
Also, download link now redirects to the github releases page.

 

[Alex Racer]

The i20 2014 deliberately has no download link due to the model creator being a bit peculiar about distributing his models ...

Please explain your comment.
What strange you found in this type of distribution model:

http://forum.rallyesim.fr/viewtopic.php?f=444&t=22986

 

[WorkerBee]

Hi Alex !

Well, basically nothing is wrong with your distribution. But it is hosted at mediafire, and I doubt that it supports a direct, unattended download without user interaction. Therefore we had to exclude this model.
This is no real issue, as the user still can download it manually and let the tool take care of installing it into the right slot.

This tool is supposed to make life easier.
As usual, all credits go to the respective authors of the models and the physics.

Regards,
Uncle G.

 

[Alex Racer]

Hi Alex !

Well, basically nothing is wrong with your distribution. But it is hosted at mediafire, and I doubt that it supports a direct, unattended download without user interaction. Therefore we had to exclude this model.
This is no real issue, as the user still can download it manually and let the tool take care of installing it into the right slot.

This tool is supposed to make life easier.
As usual, all credits go to the respective authors of the models and the physics.

Regards,
Uncle G.

Hello, Uncle G!

Ok, but as I see some of my models were somebody posted on

www.dropbox.com

and the links to them were included in this mod.
It's strange for me why this was not done for "i20 2014" ...

 

[WorkerBee]

Hi Alex,

all links point to the official NGP download archive.
I guess maybe I was just too lazy to repack the model archive to fit into the NGP universe.
Quite a long time ago, you know.

Don't worry, we will fix this.

Regards,
Uncle G.

 

[zissakos]

updated to v1.0.3
* added: context menu to update model/physics for a car
* fixed: exception when updating NGP plugin

 

[zissakos]

New release v1.0.4:
* added: new menu entry "update all existing physics" in download menu

https://github.com/zissakos/RBRCIT/releases

 

[GEORGEF]

Hello.

I am having trouble making this work, I seem to keep getting the error message when I click "start game". Have you seen this before, if so Is it a simple fix?

 

[porridge]

Hello.

I am having trouble making this work, I seem to keep getting the error message when I click "start game". Have you seen this before, if so Is it a simple fix?

Install the game updates 1.01 + 1.02 and try again.

 

[GEORGEF]

fixed! thank you

 

[Helder Marques]

Hi guys. Maybe you can help me out here.

I have a clean RBR instalation, with updates 1.01 and 1.02. I installed RBR cz, everything working fine.
Then I install RBRCIT, and i'm able to download and install cars, etc.

Then I installed some new audio files (portuguese pacenotes actually. I think it uses dattol or so, and puts new audio files. it works in almost every stages, not all don't now why).

Anyway, after this, everything works fine, but RBRCit keeps saying the audio file needs to be downloaded (again). But if I do it, the game crashes. I had to get back to previous audio.dat, and cannot change audio...

Is this related with pacenotes? I believe so, but I'd like to have both... Can someone help me?

Thanks

 

[porridge]

This Portuguese pack... sounds like you're perhaps referring to something that has files like BatchQry.exe, install.bat and dattool.exe and folders like "maps" and "note"? If so, you really shouldn't install it by executing the bat, it's pointless and possibly causing all the trouble when you already have audio.dat extracted by RBRCIT.