This readme is unfinished...

GEM+ 2 and iGOR

Introduction

GEM+ is designed to be used in conjunction with Papyrus' racing simulator 'Grand Prix Legends'. It allows easy modification of many hidden settings from a single user interface and acts as a central hub from which to run other GPL utilities.

The first version allowed easy swapping of engines between chassis. Version 2 also allows this but in addition it adds the ability to completely change the physics to simulate 1965 1.5 litre Grand Prix cars instead of the standard 1967 3 litres. This has been made possible through the tireless work of the '1965 Mod' team, led by Richard Cooke.

iGOR is the work of Phil Flack. It provides similar functionality to VROC but with explicit support for the new car classes. Most importantly, it interfaces with a set of online security programs written by Tom DeMuer. The two together are designed to ensure that the physics on each GPL client connected to a server is the same as the server. If there is a mismatch the client is forcibly disconnected.

Providing the racelist information for iGOR is nidhoegger written by Christoph Frick. I'm sure the name is an acronym but I was afraid to ask what for...

The whole suite is designed to work as seamlessly as possible. In normal use you shouldn't need to worry about it. GEM+ creates the environment for you and copies what you need to your GPL installation.

GEM+ System Requirements
Windows 95, 98, 98se, NT, ME or XP (iGOR does not run on W95).
Papyrus' Grand Prix Legends 1.2.0.2 (1.2 with the speedfix patch)
120Mb free hard disk space (300Mb required temporarily during installation procedure)

Installation

There are three versions of the install. The only difference between them is the amount of car graphics included. The install procedure is identical for all three.

Double click on the self extracting exe. It will extract the files into a temporary directory and run the setup program.

Running GEM+ The First Time

The suite has been designed so you don't have to use GEM+ on a day to day basis if you don't want to. However, you must run GEM+ at least once to patch your GPL install for the 1965 cars and to finish setting up the iGOR environment.

The install will create shortcuts on your desktop and in the start menu. Use either to start GEM+. Delete any you don't want.

The first thing it will do is to ask you to select a language. Select your preferred language and press OK.

If you have GPL installed in a non default location, GEM+ will ask you to tell it where it is. You can point GEM+ at multiple versions of gpl.exe or even different install directories if you wish. Once you've defined at least one install and pressed OK, GEM+ will start.

Click on the red flag at the bottom left of the window to exit GEM+. When it exits, GEM+ will modify your installation in the following ways:

- Creates new patched versions of gpl.exe, one for each carset.
- Creates new car directories in your GPL install containing car graphics for the 1965 cars (not on the minimal install)
- Creates a directory called mods and copies in various ancilliary files required for iGOR.
- Copies in the online security programs.
- Copies in new AI files for the '65 cars.

If you are going to use GEM+ you don't have to do anything else. If you aren't and you want to use the 1965 cars offline, then you will need to create shortcuts to any of the new exes you wish to use. There is one for each of the following carsets; 1965 F1, FD, FG and FV. You should find them easily enough. Each one starts with the name of your main gpl.exe with a suffix describing the carset. For example if your main exe is gpl.exe, the 1965 F1 version will be gplc65.exe and FD will be gplcfd.exe.

And that's it. You're ready to go. Using iGOR is dealt with in a separate readme. The rest of this document deals with using GEM+.

The 1965 Grand Prix Cars

The reason 99% of you downloaded GEM+ is to run the '65 mod and the other 1% clicked on the wrong link. The '65 cars are the reason GEM+ 2 was written. They are superb fun to race but there are a few things you'll need to consider.

Setups

The modifications for the 1965 physics include changes to the selection of the final drives and gearsets available in the GPL setup screen. This has been done to enable you to match the gearing more closely to the different engine characteristics of the cars.

Unfortunately this has a couple of side effects. If you open a 1967 setup in a gpl.exe set for 1965 the gearset in the setup will be modified randomly. Once you've saved it as a '65 setup you can't then use it on a '67 car unless you change all the gearing back.

Also GRE won't load '65 setups. To take account of this the setup screens in GPL have been modified to allow much finer increments and some of the maximum and minimum values have changed.

A lot of thought and discussion went into this but at the end of the day the gearsets designed for 3 litres engines simply don't suit the higher revving 1.5's.

Racing the AI


Getting Started With GEM+

The GEM+ user interface has been designed to be as obvious and easy to use as possible. There are a few things to be aware of though to avoid confusion.

Carset Switching

The carset dropdown at top left determines which exe will be called when you press the 'GPL' green flag to run GPL offline. By default it is linked with the selected player. This is so you can create different players for each carset if you wish. The link between carset and play can be switched off in the configuration screen if you so wish.

Player.ini Files

One potentially confusing feature is the fact that the '65 carset cars have a separate player.ini file to the other carsets. If you look in your player directory for a player you've used with the '65 carset you will see a file called playc65.ini. This is the player file used by gplc65.exe. The reason for this is to support GPLRank. GPLRank can easily tell which carset was used to create a set of times.

The reason it can cause confusion is that each player.ini holds a lot of other settings like track, car and graphic options so each player will have different settings for each carset. Change the carset and some or all of the settings are likely to change. It's not a bug, just a feature you need to be aware of.

Debugging

If GEM+ crashes it will create a file called debug.txt in the GEM+ directory. This contains details of the GPL installation along with the error and other information useful in diagnosing the problem.

There is also an extra button marked "Debug". If you press this it will produce the file without closing GEM+. This is useful if you find a bug that is not actually crashing GEM+.

The New Exes

GEM+ creates a separate exe for each of the carsets it supports. Each one is completely self contained and patched to pick up the appropriate car graphics, sounds etc.

For each one GEM+ looks at your GPL installation and determines which carset specific features are present. If they're there it patches the exe accordingly. I'll give an example to illustrate the concept.

Imagine your main GPL exe is called gpl.exe. GEM+ creates an exe called gplc65.exe. When it does so it loads gpl.exe into memory to patch it. First it modifies the physics to be the 1965 cars. After that it checks for the presence of things like the cars65 directory, the various GPL menu files, 1965 specific sound files etc. For each one it finds, GEM+ patches the exe to use it so in the case of the '65 cars it patches the exe to point to cars65 rather than cars67. Once the exe has been patched in memory GEM+ saves the new version as gplc65.exe.

GEM+ goes through each carset in turn and does the same thing so you end up with one exe for each carset. Assuming your main '67 exe is gpl.exe you will end up with the following:

gpl.exe (standard '67 Grand Prix and Advanced and Basic Trainers)
gplcfd.exe (FD cars - F1 chassis, Advanced Trainer engine)
gplcfg.exe (FG cars - F1 chassis, Basic Trainer engine)
gplcfv.exe (FV cars - Advanced Trainer chassis, BT engine)
gplc65.exe ('65 Grand Prix and Advanced and Basic Trainers)
gpl65d.exe ('65 FD cars - '65 F1 chassis, '65 Advanced Trainer engine)
gpl65g.exe ('65 FG cars - '65 F1 chassis, '65 Basic Trainer engine)
gples.exe (Formula Libre - Any chassis, any engine)

GEM+ keeps track of which exes have been patched with which features so if you change something it will patch the appropriate exe. Also because it based all the exes on your standard gpl.exe, any patches like the bandwidth patch or GPLShift will be passed onto the others automatically.

If after you've installed GEM+ you wish to apply a patch like the bandwidth patch to your system, just apply it to the main gpl.exe. The next time you go into GEM+ it will detect that gpl.exe has changed and automatically recreate the others.

All this might sound complicated (having had to write it all I can assure you that underneath the skin it is ;o) but the upshot of it all is that in normal use you should not have to worry about it. Just ignore the extra exes and let GEM+ keep them in line.

Using GEM+

The User Interface

Unusually among Windows applications, the controls in GEM+ scale with the size of the window. You can customise how GEM+ does this in the configuration window. There are five relative sizes available from a dropdown or if you don't like the scaling you can switch it off and specifiy a fixed control height.

While you're in the configuration window there are a few other options you might want to change.

"Keep GEM+ Loaded While in GPL"

This only applies to offline racing. If set on GEM+ will not exit when it fires up GPL. This results in a slightly quicker response when you exit GPL and return to GEM+. We're talking slight though so I wouldn't get too excited about it. ;o)

"Link Carset to Player"

If this is checked then GEM+ will change the carset in line with the player. This means you can create a different player for each carset. iGOR doesn't use this setting.

By default value this is switched on.

"Confirm Changes on Exit"

You can turn off the "confirm changes" message when you exit GEM+. If you do this GEM+ will save all required changes when it exits.

Play .... Animations

GEM+ has a feature which allows the car/track/carset pictures to be overridden with videos. If there is a .mpg, .avi or .wmv file with the appropriate filename in the GEM+ "videos" directory GEM+ will display it in preference to the picture.

These three checkboxes allow you to switch this feature off.

Online Compatibility Mode

This dropdown allows you to select how to patch GPL for online racing.

The default is iGOR mode. In this mode GEM+ creates separate exes for each carset and writes a file to the "mods" directory in GPL telling iGOR which exe contains which carset.

In VROC compatibility mode GEM+ patches the standard gpl.exe with the selected carset in much the same way that GEM+ 1 did. The '65 carset is unavailable in this mode.

VROC + '65's is the same as VROC mode but the '65 carset is available.

VROC contains no support for online security or cheat protection which is why we wrote iGOR and GPLSecur. In VROC mode you won't know if people are using the same carset.

Scale Controls with Window

Uncheck this box and the controls won't scale with the window. A spinner will magically appear which allows you to specify the control height.

Language

Select your preferred language. This is the language used for the majority of messages in GEM+ and for the controls. There are some messages which missed the cut but it should mostly work. Several language files are supplied with the initial release and more are planned. Or you can even create your own. See the appendices for details.

Installs

Opens a dialogue in which you can specify multiple exes to use with GEM+. You can specify multiple exes within a single GPL directory or completely separate installs.

The GEM+ Spinner controls

GEM+ gives you control over the most common settings within GPL. Some of them are available within GPL's interface while others are not.

I've tried to make the user interface as intuitive as possible. To do this most of the controls are simple dropdowns or checkboxes. The numeric settings though use a spinner which requires a little explanation to get the best out of it.

The spinner control has four small arrow buttons. Two to the left of the value and two to the right. The two to the left increase and decrease the value in large increments and the two to the right, smaller increments.

Each spinner has a minimum and a maximum setting. It won't allow you to set the value outside of this range.

For exact control over the value you can type it in. Simply click on the value itself and the control magically transforms itself into an input box. Modify the value and press enter. If you want to restore the original value press Escape.

Calling Other Utilities From GEM+

One of the key features of the original GEM+ was the ability to configure buttons to call other GPL utilities. This feature has been carried over to GEM+ 2 but modified a little.

Using the 'Buttons
Graphical Buttons

You can make the buttons at the bottom of the windows graphical by specifying a JPEG to use on the button definition. These pictures use a different aspect ratio of 4:3. I would recommend smaller picture files, something like 100 x 33 seems about right to me. Larger resolutions will be scaled to fit but slow down the user interface slightly.

Using Separate Car Graphics For Different Carsets

Each carset exe can be patched to use it's own set of car graphics. GEM+ looks for directories in the '..\GPL\CARS' directory which have names 6 characters long. It displays them in a dropdown below the carset picture and allows you to select one for each carset.

It's your own responsibility to ensure that each directory contains a valid set of GPL car directories. GEM+ does not check them for validity. The safest way is to copy the standard CARS67 directory off the GPL CD then patch it with your preferred graphics. Don't forget MIRROR.MIP, that's a common cause of unexplained CTD's.

You can't have separate car graphics for the standard Advanced and Basic Trainers as they're not separate exes and each exe can only point at one graphics set. Which is a pity I admit.

If you've installed the 'Lite' or 'Full' versions of GEM+, the '65 cars will be installed automatically for you. The 'Lite' version has the lower resolution (but still superb) car graphics. The 'Full' version allows you to select between the lite and the high resolution set.

The Full set looks stunning but does require a good machine to avoid frame rate problems. The lite set is little more heavy on the machine than the original Papyrus GPL cars so should run on anything.

Other carsets are entirely up to you to set up manually. As long as you give the directory a 6 character name GEM+ will allow you to select it from the dropdown.

Appendices

GEM+ limitations and known bugs

I've tried to make GEM+ support as many GPL versions and patches as possible but with the best will in the world it's impossible to cover every single combination and patch. Here are a few things to bear in mind. It's not an exhaustive list.

GEM+ 2 only supports GPL 1.2.0.2. That's 1.2 with the speedfix patch applied. There's a great deal of data that has been patched to model the '65 cars and a lot of it is stored in different places in the various different International versions of GPL. Supporting all the international versions of 1.2.0.1 as well proved too difficult.

Exes modified using Resource Hacker or GPL Season are not fully supported, but only for the team and car names. The sim will run fine, you'll just have the standard '67 car and team names.

Creating your own language file

GEM+ is designed to be multilingual. It does this by reading all it's message strings and control names from files. The plan is to supply language.ini files for all the major languages but there's nothing to stop anyone creating their own. I had some fun with a "cockney" version.

If your particular language isn't available and you have the language skills you can easily create your own language file. Look in the GEM+ program directory for a folder called Languages. In there are the language files. Copy any of them, rename it and change the text within it appropriately using Notepad. The next time you go into GEM+, click on the 'Configure' button and select your new language file, et voila!

The vertical bar character '|' in a message can be used to force a carriage return into the message.

Be careful not to delete any entries or change the names to the left of the '=' sign or you'll get blank or untranslated messages or captions.

Sounds

You can have a separate set of sound files for each carset. Sound files for the carsets should be located in the GPL\Sounds\ directory. They are all .wav files with the following names:

1967: bra/brm/cov/eag/fer/lot/mur
1965: bt1/b61/c77/bt7/f65/l33/h65

nb: GEM+ sound swapping will only work with Nigel Pattinson's 'Carsound' patch installed on your main exe.

GEM+ Pictures

At the top of the GEM+ window are three pictures. The first represents the carset, the second the currently selected track and the third the car. You can change these pictures by replacing the JPEGs in the 'Pictures' subdirectory of the GEM+ program directory.

To avoid distortion the pictures should be in a 3:2 Width:Height ratio. The size itself is not important as GEM+ will scale the pictures to suit the size of the window. Obviously larger pictures with lower compression will look better but very large picture files can slow down GEM+'s user interface.

The files supplied with GEM+ are mostly 400 x 266 which I've found is a good compromise between size and quality.

GEM+ uses the following naming convention to determine which picture to use:

Carsets

1965 GP Cars: cars65.jpg
1967 GP Cars: cars67.jpg
1967 FD Cars: carsfd.jpg
etc..

Cars

cccccc_n.jpg

Where:

'cccccc' is the carset ID (cars55, cars65, cars67 etc)

'n' is the car number within the carset. For example cars67_0.jpg relates to the 1967 Brabham BT24 and cars65_6.jpg is a 1965 Lotus 33.

Tracks

GEM+ is supplied with a number of track pictures but to supply pictures for every track available for GPL would be impossible.

To create a track picture, simply create a JPEG with the same filename as the track directory.

Some excellent sets of GEM+ track pictures are available on the Internet.

Video Support

GEM+ can also display a video in place of any of the pictures. Create a folder in the GEM+ 
program folder called 'Videos'. In that put videos using the same naming convention as the pictures but instead of JPEGs you can have AVIs, MPEGs or WMVs.

By default the videos are switched off. You can enable them for any of the three picture windows in the options dialogue.

If they are enabled GEM+ will first look for a video. If there isn't one with the right filename it looks for a picture. This means you don't have to worry about having videos for all the carsets/cars/tracks.

It's a tarty little feature but I liked it. 
Paul Thurston