Track-making tutorials (vnovak.com) — archived copy
Val Novak's tutorials on building a track for Viper Racing and getting it into the game, recovered from the Internet Archive and kept here verbatim.
| Page | Covers | |
|---|---|---|
| Part 1 | The starter files, and getting a track out of ZModeler | 24 images |
| Part 2 | Continuing the export | 12 images |
| Part 3 | What to do with the exported track — surfaces, graphics, the .stp |
9 images |
| Part 4 | vrtrackmaker, and the last steps into a playable .trk |
13 images |
| Bob's Track Builder | The same job from BTB instead of ZModeler | 25 images |
files/track2gamefiles.rar |
The template kit the tutorial tells you to download | 4.2 MB |
Why this is in the repo
The pages lived at vnovak.com/vrtracktogametutpart1.html through part4, and
the Bob's Track Builder one at
vnovak.com/vr/btb2racer-2viper-racing-track-making-tutorial.html. Captured
13 February 2020; three of the five have only that single capture.
Val Novak is not a marginal figure in this game's history. vnovak.com went up
in December 2003 and became the hub: the Car Mods, Track Tools and Track
Mods archives this repo's modding history
cites were sourced from it, he built the 1.2.5 (2016) and 1.2.6 (2017)
community patches and the View Extender, and 1,668 of the 2,023 assets in the
community gallery come
from his valscars and valstracks collections. These are the track-making
instructions from the person who made most of the tracks.
They also fill the gap the other archived tutorial leaves. Wrxds's
tutorial covers building a car; this covers a
track, which is the harder half and the one this project's own
trackgen work had to reconstruct from the
binaries rather than from anyone's notes.
What was changed
The pages are as published, with three mechanical edits:
- the Internet Archive's toolbar and scripts removed;
- every image rewritten to
images/and all 105 downloaded, so the pages work from disk with no network; - a banner added at the top of each page saying what it is, so a local copy is never mistaken for the live site.
Links to other sites — ZModeler, Bob's Track Builder, XVI32, Paint Shop Pro —
are left pointing at their Internet Archive captures rather than at hosts that
may be gone. Links to the rest of vnovak.com are left pointing at the archive
too, since only these pages are copied here.
track2gamefiles.rar is Val's own template kit, fetched from
vnovak.com/tools/: .mod templates for signs and buildings, .tga textures,
aidef.ccs and camera.tab, dated between 2007 and 2015. The tutorial is close
to unusable without it, which is why it is here rather than linked.
Provenance and rights
This is preservation, not authorship. The tutorials and the template kit are Val Novak's work, reproduced so that they do not disappear with the host. If you are the author and would rather they were not here, open an issue and they will be removed.