Can BTB built tracks be converted to GPL?

[Lee Knight]

Just curious, can BTB built tracks (say for rF, Race series, etc) be converted in some way to GPL?
If so, how would one go about it? (just a basic description would do for me for now.....)

 

[R Soul]

It might be possible using 3DSimed. There's a 'GPL 3do' button, but it's only active when an individual object (gmt file) is open.

 

[Lee Knight]

Cheers R Soul (love the name by the way!)
It sounds like it could be a tedious but at least possible, although well beyond me for now.
But thank you, at least I know now!

 

[Wayne Reed]

It can be done mate and if you can read and follow what things are put down you can do

If you get 3dsimed there is a guide in there that tells you how to convert GPL to other things. So all you would have to do is do that in reverse

If you want to take a look at the guide before you get simed then let me know and I can send you it

 

[Raido]

It's not *quite* that simple I'm afraid.

GPL has a very old-fashioned and moddable-unfriendly coding and file structure, it has had a lot of good modders over the years and even with 3Dsimed around, I've *never* heard of anyone succeeding in converting a track to GPL and making it run. Plenty of tracks gone the other way around - but never from another sim into GPL.

3Dsimed never really developed as a tool for doing this, either (since you'd normally convert from the old sim to the new). Only the other way around.

 

[Lee Knight]

What program is used to build GPL tracks?
Would it be possible to export a track from BTB in DirectX & then import that into the GPL track building program & Exporting from there?
Bit of a round about way I guess, but BTB seems so much easier to use.....
This is mainly just curiosity at this stage as I figure with all the excellent tracks that GPL have given the rest of us sim-ers in various formats, it would be nice to send a few of our awesome tracks back as a kind of thank you.

 

[Raido]

What program is used to build GPL tracks?
Would it be possible to export a track from BTB in DirectX & then import that into the GPL track building program & Exporting from there?
Bit of a round about way I guess, but BTB seems so much easier

BTB *is* much easier (as long as it works ) than the several separate alpha-state utils that are needed to build a GPL track (3dOtrackeditor, 3Dedit, Trkmaker etc - I can't even remember them all). None of these ever worked quite right and they were all unfinished and buggy. Add to that, you'd have to edit most 3D points and vectors etc. *by hand*, as in code number changing bit by bit. There were no mouse-driven tools to make those tracks.

Some rare people with much time and dedication managed to work around those limitations, but most didn't. And no, you can't simply use modern 3D tools and then import them in those GPL utils. They were very very basic and simply weren't made for importing stuff, ony editing GPL objects 'by hand'.
Believe me, if it were easy, modders would've done it some way. But it never happened since with the current "raw coding" and buggy tools, and without the source code, it stayed just about as hard to mod as it was in 1999.