Hi all!

Let me start by saying that it's very exciting to see so many people still actively engaged in a Pod community. I didn't know that this forum existed; quite a nice surprise!

When I purchased the GoG version of Pod, I was not aware that I could use the CD Patcher to add tracks and cars to the game. Because I didn't understand this, I instead just swapped out Jaero's and Fuego's .BV4 files. The game still thought of the car as Jaero in every way except the model it displayed in-game (which was Fuego). As I was successfully able to do this, I wanted to conduct an experiment: I like Fuego's shape, though I'm not necessarily tied to its paint scheme. I used Pod Paint to successfully change Fuego's textures over to a color scheme I liked better. Then I thought I might try to take it a step further: What if I created another Fuego in, say, AV1's paint scheme. I made the necessary modifications using Photoshop and Pod Paint, and created a Fuego in AV1's paint scheme. Then, using my hard-swap method, I simply replaced the original AV1.bv4 with the Fuego version of AV1. I launched Pod, and after cancelling the intro movie, the game crashed and threw out a "Pod Fatal Error: File Access Error." After some experimentation, I came to the conclusion that the modified car (AV1) couldn't be in the current 8 cars. So, I loaded a different car in AV1's place, then replaced AV1.bv4 with the Fuego version again. This time, the game loaded. I went to the car replacement screen, and tried to load the Fuego AV1, and the game crashed again, throwing the same error. So I've since figured that the error is because the game can still tell that I'm trying to put two versions of the same car (Fuego) in at the same time.

So, my question to you, Pod community, is this: Is it at all possible to have two of the same car loaded at the same time? To make it work, would it require some other modification of game files to fool the game into thinking that the two cars are, in fact, different (even though they're both essentially Fuego)? And do you think using the CD Patcher would yield different results? (I'm going to try this one out on my own, but I ask in case anyone had tried anything like this already.)

Thank you for your time in reading this post! I look forward to your answers!

Whoa, my apologies for the double post.
Update: I was not able to figure out a way to do it via the CD Patcher.

Also, after doing some more digging, it appears that custom cars and car editing seem to still elude everyone. So perhaps my idea is a little more difficult to implement than I had originally guessed?

Still, I'd love to hear your thoughts or possible solutions!

Thanks!

(super late reply, but why not?)

IIRC...

If cars work like tracks, they all have a unique internal ID which the CD patcher checks on to see if you already have the stuff "installed" in your POD game (where "installed" just means it made an entry of the same ID in your VOITURES.BIN).

What you do to the files on the file system (in the BINARY VOITURES folder) is independent of the "installed" vehicles and IDs (which are, as said, stored in the VOITURES.BIN), so if you replace the model of one car with the other, you should have the same model loaded twice (with different IDs) in-game.

Of course the cleaner way would be to make a copy of a car with a new unique ID, or modify your VOITURES.BIN manually. My C# library can help you messing around with those files if you like https://github.com/Syroot/Pod