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Car Creation / Conversion Tutorial (wrxds.mine.nu) — archived copy

A complete 19-step tutorial on building or converting a car for Viper Racing, recovered from the Internet Archive and kept here verbatim.

Read it → — or jump to 1. gathering information · 2. the 3D mesh · 5. textures · 6. sounds · 7. performance · 10. first drive · 14. the dashboard · 17. packaging it up. Supporting files: inertias.xls, lefthandCockpit.tab, righthandCockpit.tab, files/.

Why this is in the repo

The original lived at http://wrxds.mine.nu/tutorial/ — a machine that started life in 2003 as "Impreza's Viper Racing Dedicated Server", run by BlasterMaster555, and which also hosted the FTP archive Val's site linked as "accumulated from 1998" (ftp://wrxds.mine.nu/vrmods/). The host outlived the game, becoming a Live for Speed and then a Minecraft server, but it kept the tutorial online throughout.

The site is gone. The FTP directory listing was never captured at all. The tutorial pages were, and this is a copy of them, because everything else this project has learned about the community's documentation is that links die and only what someone wrote down survives.

It is also the source that was missing. This repo's history doc already listed the tools this tutorial describes — Zmodeler 1.07, XVi32, the rescrack/mkres/mktex/mksfx set, vrzmodtemplate — details you cannot get from a binary, only from documentation like this. But no source was ever cited, and the connective tissue was lost: that the converters are one suite (Frank P. Wolf's RESTools), that it includes mkcar, and where it was distributed. Archiving the source fixes that.

What it covers

The 17 steps (plus 3a/3b and 12a) run the whole pipeline: gathering reference, preparing and exporting the meshes, the dashboard, RESTools, textures, sounds, performance, the car's long name, packing, then a full second pass of fixes including the brake lights.

It independently corroborates work done here from the binaries — step 15 has the brake lights using effects.tga with "Alpha Glow with Illumination Effect", which is the shared effects.tex in race.res and the <prefix>b.mod slot; step 8's "long name" is the <prefix>1.tab field whose layout had to be derived from scratch; and the whole workflow of unpacking sedan.car to use as a template is what vrmod carfork automates.

Contents

• index.htm and step_*.htm — 20 pages, links rewritten to point at these local copies
• images/ — 41 screenshots and diagrams
• files/ — 3 original downloadable assets: basicfiles.zip, brakelt.mod, effects.tga

What could not be recovered

Twelve images were never captured by the Wayback Machine and are gone: almostlinedup.jpg, cockpittabexplained.jpg, clickimport.jpg, firstnameunited.jpg, SELon.jpg, lineduponx.jpg, saveasmod.jpg, materialeditorpulldownmenu.jpg, texturewindow.jpg, crossectionwheel.jpg, soundproperties.jpg, loopingplayback.gif. The pages referencing them are intact; only the illustrations are missing.

Everything the tutorial offered for download did survive, including brakelt.mod — the game's default brake-light mesh, 380 bytes, which still parses cleanly with this toolkit (8 vertices, 4 faces).

The images carry text the pages do not

These tutorials teach through annotated screenshots — Notepad windows, hex editors, modeller dialogs, with instructions written in red over the picture. That text is invisible to search and to every earlier survey of this material, so the archived images were run through OCR (upscaled 300% and normalised first, which is what turns garbled digits into exact coordinates).

It paid for itself on Sucahyo's vrTrackMaker, whose UI exists only as screenshots: the cross-section bands it sweeps along a spline (Road, Wall, Side, Rumble1, Rumble2, Grass), its banking and threshold controls, and its built-in AI-path lookup distances. That is what specified the one stage of track authoring this project had recorded as a gap — see VIPER_RACING_FILE_FORMATS.md under "vrTrackMaker, the stage in the middle".

foolandsurface.jpg also recovered the MKWORLD scene format verbatim — marker(check1), vert(-2.5187, -325.5298, 0.0000), modobject(sider.mod, 0, 0, 16, 0). One caution against over-crediting this technique, though: the rule that driveable objects must appear in both source files was noticed here first in a screenshot annotation, but it turned out to be a plain-text comment in eg-foolandsurface.txt, a file already held and already cited. OCR corroborated it; it did not discover it.

The rest was corroboration rather than discovery: the tut02x series is Hex Workshop over tf550f.mod (a format this toolkit already reads in full), and the zmod15june* series is ZModeler's UI, confirming the "VR Track creation" workflow the tool chart already lists.

Provenance

• Original: http://wrxds.mine.nu/tutorial/ by BlasterMaster555, later https://wrxds.com/tutorial/
• Source: Internet Archive Wayback Machine — pages from the 2013 capture of wrxds.mine.nu (with 2012/2011 fallbacks for pages that crawl missed); twelve images and four data files from wrxds.com, 2020 and 2022 captures
• Retrieved: 2026-09-09, completed 2026-09-13
• Reproduced here unaltered except for stripping the Wayback toolbar and rewriting links to the local copies.

What is here

Complete: every page, and every image they reference.

Getting there took two hosts. The tutorial was first recovered from wrxds.mine.nu/tutorial/, the machine this repo's history names — and that capture is missing twelve images and four data files. Querying the Archive for them by name returns nothing, which looked conclusive: gone, never captured.

It was the wrong question. The site later moved to wrxds.com/tutorial/, where the images sit at the top level rather than under images/, so a search for wrxds.mine.nu/tutorial/images/SELon.jpg finds nothing while wrxds.com/tutorial/SELon.jpg has been sitting there the whole time. All twelve came back from that host, the last of them (saveasmod.jpg) from an 8 August 2020 capture after the 2022 one failed.

Recovered alongside them: README.TXT, inertias.xls, and both lefthandCockpit.tab / righthandCockpit.tab — the working cockpit tables the tutorial hands you, which this toolkit reads directly.

The lesson is worth keeping with the files: a missing capture means you have not found the host yet, not that the thing is lost. A site that outlived its own domain twice is exactly the case where one query looks like proof.

Credit is the author's. This copy exists so the work is not lost with the host.