Not all taillights are created equal

Drive2Survive · Post by **Drive2Survive** » Sun Jan 26, 2003 3:35 pm

Learned something new the other day...

When I first built my Falcon ute truck (something over a year ago), I made some custom light textures to go with it. I used my tricks with Tracked2 to set the positions of the light textures so that they were perfectly aligned with the lights on the truck body (load truck in Tracked2, hit L to turn lights on and view, alt-tab out and edit trk file, save, alt-tab back to Tracked2 and reload truck, repeat). Tracked2 is great because it shows where the light textures will appear when you have the lights turned on, with the exception of reverse lights, so to get around this I temporarily changed those lights type from 5 (reverselight) to 0 or 1 (headlight or brakelight).

When I tried it in the game afterwards however, I was confused as to why my right-hand reverse light seemed to have moved horizontally from the location I'd assigned it, so that it was no longer properly aligned. I ended up having to give it completely different coordinates from the left one to get it to appear in the right spot.

Lately I came back and remodelled the rear end of the truck, so I had to reset the taillight coordinates. Again however, when I tried it out in the game that right-hand reverselight had crept sideways out of alignment again.

I went back to Tracked2 and figeted with the trk file for a while, but then when I repodded and went back to the game this happened:

<center><IMG SRC="http://mtm2.com/~d2s/reverselights.gif" border=0></center>

I realised I'd temporarily swapped the reverselight and brakelight types in the truck file so I could view the brakelights in Tracked2, but then forgotten to switch them back. So now my red brakelights were behaving as reverselights, and my reverselights were coming on when I hit the anchors.

This showed up why my reverselight textures were creeping - it seems that the textures used for lights of type 5 are not mirrored for the other side, unlike every other light type used on trucks. See how the red brakelight texture on the right is the wrong way around? My reverselight textures were not symmetrical (the light part isn't dead-centre in the image), and while they didn't look noticably different whether they one way round or the other, when both were given equal and opposite coordinates it always appeared that one had moved sideways. I never picked this up because when I changed their type so I could see them in Tracked2, they were always mirrored for the other side because of the different type.

So now I know why my reverselights were acting strange! Confused yet?

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Post by **Phineus** » Sun Jan 26, 2003 6:18 pm

Two good finds. First that changing the type can help with proper alignment in Tracked2. Second that reverse lights aren't mirror'd in the game. Great Stuff.

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ZOtm_BigDOGGe · Post by **ZOtm_BigDOGGe** » Mon Jan 27, 2003 9:40 am

That IS interesting....all my reverse lights have been left/right symmetrical so far, so I never noticed the lack of mirroring in the reverse lights before......good to know.

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- BigDOGGe's Boneyard ...The Best Custom Trucks in MTM2 -

Post by **Phineus** » Mon Jan 27, 2003 2:45 pm

Do you mean something different than this ?

Drive2Survive · Post by **Drive2Survive** » Mon Jan 27, 2003 6:25 pm

Um, you can just set the light beam distance to zero in the trk file... that'll kill the beams for your "perfectly aimed lights".

For my Falcon ute, because of the curvature of the front, I have two lights for each of the truck's headlights... the first is angled and aligned so that the light glare texture appears over the truck's lights, and has a zero-length beam; the second is positioned so that it's source is hidden within the truck body, and all you see is the beam coming out.

<center><IMG SRC="http://mtm2.com/~d2s/mtm2/images/temp/falcau.jpg" border=0></center>

This allowed me to have nice light effects and still have light beams that shine ahead... if I didn't do it this way, I'd have to have textures that aren't aligned with the headlights on the truck, or else have beams that point out either side and up into the sky...

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Please use the brake provided and not the vehicle in front of you.
- V8 Challenge online racing guidelines