Pedro’s Forzabintoolz – Official Support Thread., Custom Forza decals! Options

[PedrosPad]

Pedro’s ForzaBINToolz – Official support thread.
(Devised by Angerwound, implemented by Pedro)
(The announcement of the release of these tools was buried deep in an unfocused thread, so I thought I formalise their release by creating their own support thread – apologies to those to whom this not new information.)

M$’s Forza Motorsport allows limited car paintjob customisation. This is achieved through a limited set of decals and vinyls that users can apply to their cars. Some very creative people have already achieved amazing effects layering the supplied decals to create highly personalised cars (examples here).

For the less imaginative of us, I present Pedro's ForzaBINToolz. (Initially available for download from the tools page of http://www.forzacustoms.info/)

The ForzaBINToolz allow the user to replace the standard collection of available car decals with their own images (photos, clan logos, etc.). These can then be applied to the cars using the in-game tools in the “garage”.

Going technical for a moment, when you exit the in game “garage”, any custom decals are stamped onto the car’s skin (which is stored in the gamer's profile on the HDD). And it is this skin that is transmitted to others players over system link or XBOX!Live – so they do not require your personal decals to actually view and appreciate your handiwork.
fyi - The skin looks like this:


The standard decals are stored in a custom format on the game disk in the file \media\decals.bin.

Pedro’s ForzaBINDump program extracts the existing decals and vinyls into separate TGA files, readable by most graphic painting programs. And Pedro’s ForzaBINPack will reassemble a collection of TGA files back into the decals.bin file. Once the game’s decals.bin file is replaced with the new one, your own decals will be available for use in-game.

Single decals can be replaced:


Or, with more imagination, several decals can be utilised to facilitate more options. (See Pedro's TGAtoTiles also available from http://www.forzacustoms.info/)


Thanks to Angerwound, krash, jackbauer, & Nunim for their assistance and testing.
Thanks to the ForzaCustoms.info team for hosting the utils (http://www.forzacustoms.info/).
And thanks for all the posters on the xbox-scene & forzacustoms.info forums for their encouragement.

This post has been edited by PedrosPad: Jun 14 2005, 09:00 PM