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Hey Pete,

I released a tutorial for making mod cars for NFS III this year:
https://www.nfsaddons.com/downloads/nfshp/tools/6121/the-complete-guide-for-making-a-mod-car-for-nfs-iii.html

While I was writing this tutorial, I actually found a better way to get rid of the clicking noise.  I've attached page 165 with the explanation.  Here's the basic idea:

1) Listen to your car's engine sound in game.  If you hear a click, continue on to step 2.
2) Reimport your audio file into the BNK file.
3) Adjust the left boundary of the loop region by a single step (just barely moving the left boundary).
4) Save the BNK file and the VIV file.  Then go back to step 1.

Keep repeating this process until the loop region is perfect and plays without clicks.  Believe it or not, you should be able to put together a perfect audio clip in anywhere from 5-30 minutes depending on how lucky you are.

Okay so maybe it's not my alpha channel actually. It might be something to do with the face properties of my polygons. When I make the alpha channel all white and the texture all one single color, all the polygon lines do not show up anymore, but I think that is only the case because the color of the lines match the color of the polygon faces. I'll continue to dig into this and report back.

I see links all over the internet mentioning these tutorials. But when you go to the link, it brings you to a wiki page that does not have those tutorials anymore it seems. Did anyone ever archive these tutorials? Or is there a modern link that works yet?

FIGURED IT OUT.  On windows 10, I needed to copy the mfc70.dll, msvcp70.dll, and msvcr70.dll files to the SysWOW64 folder instead of the System32 folder!

Stumbled upon some Russian website forum where someone said they had to copy the files to the System folder instead of System32 on windows 98.  Which I already knew from reading the instructions... but then it gave me the idea to try copying to SysWOW64.

Same thing happens with a clean install of zmodeler and crp filter on my windows 7 laptop.  Maybe the crp filter files are bad.

It definitely has something to do with my TGA file.  As soon as I replaced that, all the lines went away.  It's probably the alpha channel.  I'll have to confirm the correct alpha channel colors that will represent the primary and secondary colors of my car in game.  And then make sure to export the TGA file with compression unchecked.

Attached my alpha channel.

Thanks for the suggestion!  I will look more into that.

I did just export and convert the FCE file from NFS III though and I didn't have any issues in NFS III.  Unless the conversion screwed something up?  I will compare the UV mapping for both my NFS III and NFS IV FCE files to see if I can spot any differences.

Or maybe I did something that I could get away with for NFS III, but creates this issue in NFS IV?  I'll post back again after looking over the UV Mapping.

These installation instructions seem pretty simple.  Followed these word-for-word (see attached image).  But when I open Zmodeler, it claims the plugins are invalid.  So it sees that they are there, but will not load them for some reason.  Anyone ever heard of this?  I've never seen it mentioned on any forums.

For some reason, my car's mesh is showing up in game for NFS IV.  It wasn't doing this in NFS III.  At first I thought it was the polygon effects, but changing those didn't help.  Anyone know what I need to change to fix this?

I've got a good understanding on what most of the values in the CARP.TXT file affect in game from reading tutorials and then confirming for myself by changing values and testing them afterwards.  But the steering tab seems like the first few values affect your car's handling, and then the rest don't do squat.  Justin Martin's CARP.TXT tutorial didn't say much about the steering tab, but the High Stakes CARP.TXT tutorial by Rudy and Sara has all this in-depth information about these values in the steering tab.  I've tried to confirm what they said is true, but I just see no difference when changing these values:

Slide multiplier
Slide velocity cap
Spin velocity cap
push factor
low turn factor
high turn factor
gradual turn cutoff
medium turn cutoff
sharp turn cutoff
medium turn speed modifier
sharp turn speed modifier
extreme turn speed modifier
Gradient understeer


What do you guys think?  Has anyone else found proof that these values actually affect the car's handling?

I think the best way around the click is to add silence to the beginning and ending of a sound sample like I explained in my original post, but you have to adjust the loop points after closing and reopening the BNK file again in NFS Wizard because then it will show that first click... which it will always have even if you don't reopen it.  Then you need to reimport the sample again and save.  So here's the process:

1) Open BNK file
2) Import sample that has a little bit of silence in beginning and ending.  This just makes it easier to see where to place the loop start and loop end.
3) Close BNK file
4) Reopen BNK file
5) Adjust loop start to where the beginning silence stops and the audio you care about starts
6) Adjust loop end to where the audio you care about ends and where the ending silence starts
7) Then reimport the sample
8 ) Then save and close

If you just save the sample after step 6) and you do not reimport the sample... it will have 2 clicks and your loop start/end will not line up anymore.

Even though the sample will not show a click upon initially importing the sample, as soon as you close that BNK file and save the VIV file... the click will be placed whether you reopen the BNK file or not.



I was trying to avoid having to mess with the start/end loop points because they're not very precise.  Like you can't specify the exact time that you want those loop points to be at.  They just increment left and right by some value.  But if you want to use NFS Wizard, you'll have to do my method above to get it to avoid the clicks.  If you could somehow import the samples into the BNK file without NFS Wizard so that there would be no clicks, then you could make your audio sample loop at the very beginning/ending of the audio file and then just put the loop start/end at the very start/end of the sample and it would loop at the exact points you would need it to.

Confirmed a couple more things.

1) The click that is added is exactly the same each time.  If you keep reimporting the same sample and clicking save, the exact same click is added to the beginning of the sample each time.

2) The first click is actually added when you import the sample.  I imported a wav file with no sound, closed the BNK window and then reopened the BNK file and the click was already there.  Even though I had not yet saved.  Then when you click save for the first time, that click doesn't change.  Any save after the first save will keep adding more clicks.

I decided to take a different route for the moment.  Trying to figure out exactly when and how NFS Wizard is adding this "click" noise.

In my case, it keeps adding the click noise only to the first sample.  This is only the case for the BNK file I am using which I grabbed from the indy 500 pace car.  For the BNK files from all the other cars, the click noise is added to both the first and the second samples (engine acceleration and deceleration respectively). Although for these BNK files, the first sample is compressed so once the click noise is added by NFS Wizard... the only way to fix it would be to overwrite the entire BNK file because you cannot overwrite the compressed sample (sample one) by importing another WAV file for these BNK files that have 4 samples.

I've also found out that just closing and reopening the BNK file in NFS Wizard does not add the click.  What adds the click is when you open the file and press save.  You won't see the click in the audio until you reopen the BNK file though.

4) BNK editor https://github.com/Nexusphobiker/BNK-Editor
    This one doesn't work with need for speed BNK files.  Gives "Invalid .bnk file" error.

And the search continues for a solution.

I'm still trying to figure this out.  I just now proved that modifying my custom audio will not fix the clicking noise even if it was perfect.  I made a completely silent audio file.  I imported that into every sample of the car.bnk file, saved it, and started up the game.  When i got into a race and revved the engine... a looped "click" was the only noise that was made.  There has to be a different way of importing your own samples into the bnk file.  NFS Wizard just ruins it every time.  This is getting so frustrating.  It's literally the last thing I want to do before uploading my car and calling it done.  I've spent over 500 hours on this car since last summer easily.  And the hours just keep racking up.  I'm so close and so far at the same time.

I can't even find another editor to modify these bnk files.  Here are other programs I found that can modify bnk files:

1) bnkextr.  All this one does is extract audio.  You can't import and overwrite audio with this one.
2) bnk editor.  This one modifies bnk files from test drive unlimited... but not from need for speed.
3) NFS Wizard.  Always inserts a "click" noise.

I guess I could try learning how to use a hex editor for this... but that seems really complex.  Idk...