TelepathicCow wrote:Hate to drag this thread up again but I have a question.
Earlier on in the thread I saw that you could do pre-qualifying and manage to select specific drivers to race in the session. How do you select which drivers to put in a session?
First, you need a new "season" to contain all of the cars and tracks in prequalifying. Here's one I made for myself, just put the files into your main SeasonData folder:
http://www.mediafire.com/?4r90gx0drscbsbd.
Next, you have to edit in all the circuits and cars needed for prequalifying. This is done by editing their "filters" with Notepad, as seen below.
For circuits, you have to edit the GDB file of each circuit, for example Silverstone 1989 should be in "SeasonData\Circuits\Great_Britain\1989_Silverstone\1989_Silverstone.gdb". Add "PQ" to the "Filter Properties" line so it reads "Filter Properties = 1989PQ". Then repeat this for every track you need prequalifying on (hint: I've already listed them in the "prequalifying season" GDB).
For cars, you have to edit the VEH file for each car you want to include in prequalifying, for example 1989 Zakspeed should be in "SeasonData\Vehicles\Zakspeed\1989_891". Open both "1989_Zakspeed34.veh" and "1989_Zakspeed35.veh" (as both Zakspeed cars were in prequalifying at the start of 1989). Go to the "Classes" line and change "FormulaOne, OpenWheel, 1989" to read "FormulaOne, OpenWheel, 89PQ". That way the car is removed from the main 1989 season and is in prequalifying instead. When a car passes prequalifying, simply edit the line to read "FormulaOne, OpenWheel, 1989PQ" so it's again included in the main season. If your own car is not in prequalifying at the moment, add the PQ tag to it as well so you can still spectate the session. Of course, when progressing through to another season remember to remove the PQ tag from each previous year's car, otherwise you'll end up with 1989 cars in 1990 and so on.
To actually run prequalifying, just adjust your number of opponents to match the number of cars currently in prequalifying, go to "Race" mode and run a practice or qualifying session (either will do), record the results and exit the race weekend. Then add the cars that passed prequalifying to the main season (as described above) and run the actual qualifying session. If you want more realism, you can run Q1 first with 30 cars, then remove the four slowest cars by editing their filters so you can run Q2 (and the race itself) with 26 cars.
Please be aware that for the changes in VEH or GDB files to take effect in-game, they have to be done before starting the game. In other words you have to exit the game after each prequalifying/Q1 session, do the necessary changes and then start the game again.
TelepathicCow wrote:Also, is there any way to change the reliability of a car?
In the folder of each car, you can find an INI file for the engine the car is using (in Zakspeed's case, it's Yamaha_OX88.ini). Open it in Notepad and scroll down to two lines, LifetimeAvg and LifetimeVar. Decreasing LifetimeAvg automatically makes the car more unreliable, while editing LifetimeVar changes the random variance of the engine's "lifetime" so it can make the car both less or more reliable.