A new car, and the creator in a window

2026-10-24, afternoon.

42.13 seconds into the same race: the stock GAMMA 7th at 48 mph (left), the new car BLUEGAMMA 4th at 152 mph (right), read from the content folder the extras installer wrote.

A car of its own

The morning's creator changed a car in place. A new car needs more than its two model files: a record in a car list, menu pictures and sounds. The extras session had already found how the fan cars of 1997 arrive (docs/extras.md): each is a folder with a list of one record, the .bv3, .bv4, .img and .meg, and Ubi Soft's CD Patcher copied them in and appended the record to VOITURE2.BIN. Its installer, pod-extras, does the same today.

So pod-viewer car GAMMA … --new BLUEGAMMA bluegamma --package DIR writes exactly such a folder: the edited files under the new name, GAMMA's menu pictures with the same tint, its sounds, and a record that keeps GAMMA's own bytes apart from the file and menu names. The car's name inside its files stays "gamma": the game does not compare it with the list (measured: the fan car Banana is "banana1" inside). pod-extras installed it without a change, and Un-POD raced it from the installed folder. It races exactly like the same edits made on GAMMA itself, to the 1/65536 of a second, as it should.

Single parts

Three more edits: move one vertex of one object (the normals of its faces follow), point one face at another texture page, and draw a whole page from a PNG file. The last one fills a page of both files: the .BV3 through the nearest colours of its palette, the .BV4 in 16-bit colour.

In a window

The viewer has a create box beside a car, like the track editor's edit box. It opens a panel: the five garage settings as sliders, a colour for the tint, the scale, one vertex or face, a parameter by name, a page from a picture, save, and "write as a new car". Each button makes the same edit as the command line, and the car is drawn again from the edited file.

In the browser the game's files arrive one by one, so the car was open before its .BV3 had loaded and the box never appeared. The app now fills in the car's other files as they arrive.

What the morning got wrong

• The palette. The morning's creator inferred the .BV3 colours from the .BV4, because a note said the .BV3 palette slot was empty. It is not: every .BV3 carries a full palette, the same 768 bytes as CHROME.CH3's (measured). Un-POD, which now draws the .BV3 with the real palette, showed the "blue" car teal. The creator now uses the file's own palette, and the 8-bit pages through it match the 16-bit ones within 2.5 to 6.0 levels of 255 on every car.
• An old binary. After that fix the car was still teal. The tests had rebuilt only the test program; the pod-viewer that made the files was the old one.
• The axes. The shape edit was meant to make the car longer. GAMMA's body spans x ±3.6, y ±1.66 and z ±0.57, so x runs along the car, and the "longer" car was 15% wider.
• The lap times. The morning's times came from the Un-POD of that hour. On today's build the stock GAMMA does 349.3 s for three laps, the edited one 312.9 s, grip 5 359.9 s. Un-POD is deterministic, but only for the same build.

Car	Laps (s)	Total (s)	Place
GAMMA, stock	124.75, 111.78, 112.77	349.30	4
GAMMA, edited	106.35, 93.68, 112.89	312.92	2
BLUEGAMMA (new car, same edits)	106.35, 93.68, 112.89	312.92	2
GAMMA, grip 5	125.13, 117.75, 117.02	359.90	5

Next

• Pick a vertex or a face with the mouse, as the track editor picks faces.
• Save from the browser build.
• Install a new car into the original in the emulated PC (the extras session's installer; the race-loop session runs the PC).