I recently downloaded various ACF1 Mania mods for AC only to realise the liveries were from the wrong year on the car (their 2020 mod had 2019 cars but with 2020 liveries). It gets worse when you realise their 2018 season pack is just the 2017 grid with a halo glued over the cockpit and the shark-fin chopped off. The way they've textured their cars is very inconvenient as they operate via a decal system. This involves creating .dds files with all the sponsorship decals and livery patterns compiled o one big .dds file. This makes editing their liveries very difficult as the mapping of these decals on the 3D model of the cars only really works for that particular livery. It becomes even more complicated when the decal mapping for each car is different so you can't just swap .dds files. The only way you can properly change the liveries is by manually retexturing the whole car in a 3D modelling program like Autodesk 3DS Max, a programme which I have very little experience in. If someone could give me guidance on mapping textures manually in 3DS Max and editing the 2018 cars to turn them back into 2017 cars then it would be much appreciated. Thank you.
I've done some experimenting and from what I can make out is that the mapping is so bizarre to what you usually see in AC that the decals themselves aren't just like stickers or textures on the car's body but rather an integral part to the body itself. Hiding selected decal elements create holes in the car itself - they're a fundamental part of the car's body.
Yeah, if you don’t have any prior experience, maybe a good idea to stay away from their below standard mods
It's not that their bad quality, necessarily, it's just the fact that the car itself is right there but the texture of it is so wack that it just spoils it all. The physics are fine so I'll see if I can import some models from the F1 Codemasters games and replace the existing models with those. If not then I'll have to look elsewhere, probably ACFL.
