One last goodie .. ;)

[FranknFurter]

Ok .. one last goodie perhaps for christmas ..

It's a recently re-reworked version of Sniper's '77 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am SE from 'Snowy and the Bandit' movie ... one part of the game setup I did long ago, it has several different refined stuff like an ODL, better radially symmetric rims/wheels and the texture is also downscaled to standard HS size of 256x256px with also some nice authentic movie license plates at both the front and rear end

Are you folks interested in it for an upload?

..and does someone know if Sniper is still in business and if he has a valid email adress for an upload permission?

Cheers
Frank

[Paul Spain]

  Definatly, this car is so cool, It's way better than the one out now on NFS Cars.

[noise]

Car is very welcome.The textures on the screenshot are still not so sharp i.m.o.

Many cars have 512x512 texture.Can you show how you rescale that to 256x256?

p.s. wasn't it Smokey and the bandits?

[FranknFurter]

Ok .. I'm posting it here for testing issues again .. I removed the sound files except for the AI external sound (Ocareng.bnk) for attachment filesize reasons .. drag and drop the necessary sounds from the default EA Pontiac's car.viv to the '77TA' car.viv and .. have fun!

@Paul: thanks for that honest opinion of yours ..

@noise: I usually import the car's car00.tga into a QFS file and extract that afterwards ... FSHTool generates a new folder with 0000.bmp and an alpha channel 0000-a.bmp, you can then easily resize them, you have to reimport it to a qfs file again then ..

You can of course keep the 512x512px texture, but HS resizes that ingame anyway and distorts it, so I find it better to prior resize and then define the correct mapping by yourself ..

[FranknFurter]

.. could've been such a nice termination of the year .. but international terror now hit us also in Germany, both terrific and sad incident for the people there in Berlin last night ..

[WiLL]

I don't have Tv, Cable at home Frank but what all happen, I seen a Semi' Truck what?? Crashs, into another Crowd many deaths...
This World we live in today, is a Scary.. place an at Christmas holiday week too... wish it ever stop..  that bad news the Terrorist do.

[FranknFurter]

Some good news ... I have Sniper's GO for an official upload of the reworked version of his Pontiac .. so this is my little Christmas present then to our community folks

Cheers
Frank

[noise]

Good news indeed, so you're gonna upgrade all his MCO conversions too?

[Rider66]

Hey Frank, just curious. In scope not of Bandit, but F-bodies themselves, do you happen to rework only '77, or there are some performance updates you've been playing around for different years and models? I'm a big fan of Firebirds, so that's definitely was the question I was about to ask 
Especially these '73 and '74 SD-455's   

[Zpectre]

Frank, you need to use a proper image editing tool to resize those textures!

This car is legendary, but I find Jason Trusty's '79 in the Detroit Muscle mod to be a bit better.

[FranknFurter]

@Rider66: no, not yet planning such but I know these cars you mean, they were done by 'Bodie' weren't they and they're still available on NFSCars? .. if I did so I don't know if I would get permission on publishing any modified releases of them ...

Similar probs with some of our own cars here on server from F-Body action about getting permission from Azra and Mecha, better not touch so I was told ..

But if you only need some performance reworks for the SD-455's shouldn't be a big problem .. these cars are almost perfect anyway and all I could do was reduce their polyload or overall meshload a bit ..
Do you also like the Firebird's sister model by Cube396, the '70 Camaro RS/SS and Z/28?

@Zpectre: Well, as Sniper stated in his description he used exactly that car (JTrusty's '79 Firebird) for his '77 Firebird T/A rework and I only had Sniper's mod for some final reworks on it so if it had any major errors I corrected them as far as I could if possible but you might have to live with some carried-on errors/bugs of his mod so far then ..

Concerning textures: what I generally do is extracting the .bmps from a previously imported .qfs file of a particular texture since I prefer to continue working with .bmps where I can do much more precise remapping using seperate files (texture and alpha seperately) rather than on a 'complete' .tga file .. see also my little treatise on Police H.Q. forum about that issue ..

Resizing a .bmp by another graphics editor shouldn't make any noticeable difference on that does it?
Tried many but all produce same blurr doing so (what is natural of course since you loose graphic information ) and what then afterwards needs to be corrected manually by some diligence 'pixel-by-pixel' work ...

[Rider66]

@Rider66: no, not yet planning such but I know these cars you mean, they were done by 'Bodie' weren't they and they're still available on NFSCars? .. if I did so I don't know if I would get permission on publishing any modified releases of them ...

Similar probs with some of our own cars here on server from F-Body action about getting permission from Azra and Mecha, better not touch so I was told ..

But if you only need some performance reworks for the SD-455's shouldn't be a big problem .. these cars are almost perfect anyway and all I could do was reduce their polyload or overall meshload a bit ..
Do you also like the Firebird's sister model by Cube396, the '70 Camaro RS/SS and Z/28?

Yeah. Too bad that they don't have good performances even today. Guess that the correct standalone performances for both of these would be fine, as long as we don't mess around with original packages.
In the past, I was trying to contact Bodie, but never got any response at all. As for my latest 350 '71 model, based on Juiced mesh, well, it's not gonna make it to HS anyway. Too high poly to be here - now it's more about 60k polys.


There were a lot of work done in quite different terms... Hadn't finished it yet, however. This year, probably 
So, speaking of SD-455's, I believe that just perf files would be fine. And we can just keep them that way.
As for the FBF cars - agreed. It's not that good that these models still running on more or less generic performance files instead of correct ones. I'd love to try realistic German vs. American B-class race with, say, VW Passat from RSR as a competitor on base RS Camaro - I bet it would be interesting drive
Yeah, Cube's Camaros seems great too. I remember back in the days seeing these models even in GTA community.

[Zpectre]

@Frank: Image editors generally have better resampling filters, which would theoretically make the image quality a bit better. But I agree with you otherwise, when it comes to 512x512 TGA files, if you resize them you have to fix the aplha channel on the resized texture anyway.

@Rider66: The 4th gen Camaro Z28 and Firebird Formula could be optioned with a close ratio Borg Warner T-56 6-speed manual transmission, which is reflected in the game, but the stock game files benefit the automatics much more because they have better top end. The manual Camaro can't quite keep up with the Jaguar XKR on high speed tracks, whereas the automatic can.