NFS5 CRP Model Filter

Readme

Welcome

This is a public release of the NFS5 CRP Model Filter for ZModeler 1.x. The contents of this release are primarily targeted towards car modellers/converters who are interested in exporting their cars to the classic Need for Speed Porsche Unleashed/2000 game. This release is versioned as "1.0 Release Candidate 1" or 1.0 RC1 -- it is near final release quality and should not have as many bugs.

Filter Features

Currently the filter supports the following features:

Export to the CRP format
Support for unlimited objects/parts
Bounding planes for model-world collisions
4 Texture files with no limit on dimensions (some restrictions apply, i.e. must be power of 2, graphics card limits, etc)
Some minimal support for damaged objects
Pseudo protection for exported files. (Pseudo as it is not a real protection, but it should prevent 'kids' from importing files as much as possible).
EAZIP (EA 10FB) compression for exported files.

The following is unsupported and may or may not be supported in the future:

Animation (drivers, moving spoilers, etc)
Level of Detail (LOD) models
Importing -- ZModeler already provides limited support for importing of EA's CRP files.
Single sided (culled) polygons. Currently all exported cars don't have culling (a large performance hit on the graphics card).

No documentation is currently provided for the following, but is supported in some way by the filter:

Lights & Effects (Very minimal low level support)

Requirements

ZModeler 1.07b

Installation Procedure

Extract the contents of this ZIP file to temporary folder on your computer
Copy the contents of the ZModeler folder to the ZModeler installation folder on your computer (usually C:\Program Files\ZModeler). There should already be a Filters folder in the installtion folder -- say "Yes" to the Confirm Folder Replace.
Copy the contents of the System32 folder to your Windows installation's system directory. This directory is System32 for Windows 2000/XP (default: C:\WINNT\System32 or C:\Windows\System32), and System for Windows 95/98/ME (default: C:\Windows\System). If prompted to overwrite a file, you may say "No" as the existing files would work just fine.
Load up ZModeler. Click on the Help menu and there should be a "About Plugins" submenu and a "NFS:PU Car Model Filter" item in there. Existance of this item shows the successful installation of the filter. If this does not exist, then you may not have copied some of the required files properly!

Next Steps

Read the HTML files in the Docs folder -- especially the Basic Filter Usage file
Model/convert your car in ZModeler as per the specifications
Export to the CRP format
Add the car to NFS5 and test it
Create a save game with your car
ZIP it all up and upload it to NFS sites online for others to enjoy!

Disclaimer/Warranty/Support

This program/plugin/documentation/etc. is provided absolutely free and on an "as-is" basis without warranty of any kind whatsoever. Use it at your own risk.

Absolutely no support is provided for this product. If you have questions or need help, please seek one of the NFS forums (NFS Cars, ND4SPDWorld, etc).

If you have any bugs to report (you must provide steps to recreate the bug), comments, greetings, donations, old broken hardware that you are throwing away, free gaming related promotional materials, or anything that might interest me, you can email me at oneforaru@gmail.com.

Credits

The CRP filter, and near completition of the CRP file format was done by Arushan (that is me) in just about 1+ years (Dec 2003 - Jan 2005) during my free time. The original CRP file format description was released by Addict and Jesper-Juul Mortensen, and a special thanks to them as most of my work was based on theirs.

I would also like to thank Oleg M. (author of ZModeler) for his support on the ZModeler API, and source code for the CRP importer found in ZModeler, and Prof. Denis Auroux for his "Unofficial Need for Speed Resources" and source to the CRP compressor and decompressor. And last, but not least, a big thank you to Azrael and the other testers who participated in the alpha testing phase of this project.

Also a big NO THANK YOU to Electronic Arts for not supplying us with the file formats... but we understand why you couldn't.