First of all,
BACKUP your "gpl.exe" and "app.ini" files
before you start. I mean it. Do it now!!
Basically, to create an FD car, you need to take a GP chassis and
swap the engine with an Advanced trainer ( 2.5 litre ) race engine.
This is accomplished through the use of
Paul Thurston's engine swapper available here. (Scroll
down to the NEWS section)
The use of the engine swapper is very straight forward.
Simply install the program and start it.
It should prompt you for the path to the GPL.EXE file.
Once it has found it, you simply need to use the drop down menus
to select the chassis engine combination you desire.
For FD cars, select the chassis you want to use, and assign it the
2.5 litre race engine.
Click on the 'Patch GPL' button, and you should receive a confirmation
that the game has been patched successfully.
Start the game, and create a new driver. call it whatever you like,
but add the FD letters to the end of the last name field. This will
be your FD profile. It is common courtesy when racing online to
append the car type to your name when driving something other than
a GP car.
For example, when you see me on the race track I can be either Lapo
Nustrini, Lapo NustriniFD or Lapo NustriniF2, depending on the class
of car I am driving. One added advantage to having separate profiles
is that it makes managing setups easier, as the FD and GP setups
both share the same file extension.
(For a very brief discussion
on FD setups and some links, go here.)
Now, whenever you use the GP car you have just modified you will
experience the joys of driving an FD car!!!
To reset the game to GP cars, simply use the engine swapper to change
the engines back to what they are meant to be, hit the "patch GPL"
button and you are done!
As you can imagine, since all this is done outside of GPL, before
you start the simulation, having to continuously use the engine
swapper each time you want to change from racing an FD car to racing
a GP can become a bit boring. So, here are two suggestions on how
to deal with this:
The first is simply to dedicate 1 or 2 cars to only FD, leaving
the rest of the GP cars unaffected. This works well if you don't
mind limiting yourself to only certain cars for each of those two
classes. Say you have selected to race an Eagle in the FD league,
simply use the
engine swapper to change the Westlake engine to a 2.5l race engine.
From then on, if you choose the Eagle GP car in GPL, you will end
up with the Eagle FD, while all other cars are kept as original.
(F2 and F3 cars are left unaffected)
The second method is somewhat more involved, but still a piece of
cake. What needs to be done is to create a GP and an FD version
of you GPL.EXE and APP.INI files. These files are then stored
in separate folders, and a script is run each time you want to change
from GP to FD and vice versa.
Here is the way I have done it.
Premise: The only patches I have on my GPL.EXE are the version 1.2
and the Discofix patch. (I don't know of any problems with other
patches - soundpatch, etc..- but I can't vouch for them)
Create two subfolders in the \SIERRA\gpl and call them "gpl-gp"
and "gpl-fd".
Copy the following files from the "\Sierra\gpl" folder to the "gpl-gp"
folder you just created:
GPL.EXE
APP.INI
Use the Engine Swapper to change the engines in the gpl.exe file
in the \SIERRA\gpl\gpl.exe file.
Copy the patched GPL.EXE and APP.INI files to the \SIERRA\gpl\gpl-fd
folder you created.
Now all you have to do when you want to drive FD cars or GP cars
is COPY the contents of the appropriate sub folder (\gpl-fd for
FD cars and \gpl-gp for GP cars :-) to the SIERRA\gpl folder.
To make this easier here are two Batch files you can use to automatically
do this.
Save these to your desktop and simply double click the one you want
before you start up GPL.
Download them here.
Below is what's in them. As you can see they are almost too simple
to bother downloading, but they are here anyway.
GPL-FD.BAT
@echo off
:: This file is used to set GPL into FD 'mode'
:: It assumes the patched gpl.exe file is in a subdirectory called
\gpl-fd
off the folder specified in the %gplroot% variable.
:: If you have not installed gpl to the default folder, you will
need to
change the next line to point ot the correct location on your disk.
set gplroot=c:\SIERRA\gpl\
copy %gplroot%gpl-fd\gpl.exe %gplroot%
copy %gplroot%gpl-fd\app.ini %gplroot%
GPL-GP.BAT
@echo off
:: This file is used to set GPL back to GP 'mode'
:: It assumes the standard gpl.exe file is in a subdirectory called
\gpl-gp
off the folder specified in the %gplroot% variable.
:: If you have not installed gpl to the default folder, you will
need to
change the next line to point ot the correct location on your disk.
set gplroot=c:\SIERRA\gpl\
copy %gplroot%gpl-gp\gpl.exe %gplroot%
copy %gplroot%gpl-gp\app.ini %gplroot%
