RallySportED-js
A version of RallySportED's track editor for browsers.
You can find RallySportED-js running live on the web here.
Features
- Ability to create and edit Rally-Sport tracks in your browser
- Software 3D rendering that replicates the game's unique style
- All in vanilla JavaScript (with a bit of Vue for the UI)
End-user's guide
An end-user's guide is provided in the distributable/help/ directory; and hosted live here.
The guide walks you through the steps to creating a new track and getting it up and running in Rally-Sport.
Developer's guide
If you'd like to modify RallySportED-js or otherwise inspect its internals, this guide is for you.
Deploying
Follow these steps to set up RallySportED-js on a server:
- Run the build script.
- Copy the contents of the distributable/ directory to where you want the app to live on your server.
- That's it.
Data formats
Rally-Sport's track data
The game stores its track data in discrete binary files. For instance, the following files are associated with track #1 ("Nurtsi cruising"):
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| MAASTO.001 | The track's heightmap. |
| VARIMAA.001 | The track's tilemap (texture indices for the PALAT file). |
| KIERROS1.DTA | The racing line for the track's CPU opponent. |
| PALAT.001 | A texture atlas referred to by the track's tilemap. |
| TEXT1.DTA | A texture atlas for track-side 3d objects (trees, etc.). |
| ANIMS.DTA | A texture atlas for animations (tire smoke, etc.). |
More information about Rally-Sport's data formats is available in RallySportED's technical documentation.
RallySportED's project data
Tracks made using RallySportED are called projects. Each project is a single Rally-Sport track that is playable in-game with the RallySportED Loader utility.
A project's data are spread across the following files (NAME to be replaced by the project's name):
| File | Known as | Description |
|---|---|---|
| NAME/NAME.DTA | Container | The track's data files concatenated into one. |
| NAME/NAME.$FT | Manifesto | Parameters for loading the track into Rally-Sport. |
| NAME/HITABLE.TXT | Hi-table | The track's record lap times. |
Container file
The container file contains the project's Rally-Sport track files concatenated into a single file. Each track file is stored in the container as a block of bytes preceded by a 32-bit header value indicating the block's length in bytes.
From start to finish, the container's byte layout is the following:
| Header | Data block |
|---|---|
| 32b n | 8b * n: MAASTO |
| 32b n | 8b * n: VARIMAA |
| 32b n | 8b * n: PALAT |
| 32b n | 8b * n: ANIMS |
| 32b n | 8b * n: TEXT |
| 32b n | 8b * n: KIERROS |
If you wanted to extract e.g. the VARIMAA file, you'd read the first value of n, skip the next n bytes, read the next value of n, and output the next n bytes.
Manifesto file
Rally-Sport hard-codes certain track-related parameters in its executables. Playing RallySportED-made tracks requires some of these hard-coded parameters to be modified at load-time.
A project's manifesto file tells the RallySportED Loader utility – whose job it is to load RallySportED tracks into the game – how the hard-coded parameters should be modified for this particular track.
(Coming: A more in-depth description of the manifesto file.)
RallySportED-js's JSON track format
For convenience, RallySportED-js stores the original Rally-Sport tracks – converted into RallySportED projects – in a JSON wrapper, which provides room for additional metadata. You can find examples of these JSON track files in the distributable/client/assets/tracks/ directory.
A JSON track file has the following format:
[{
"container": "The container file's data as a Base64-encoded string",
"manifesto": "The manifesto file's data as a plain string",
"meta": {
"internalName": "DEMOA",
"displayName": "Nurtsi-cruising",
"width": 64,
"height": 64
}
}]The internalName property holds the project's base RallySportED name. This is the name by which the project's container and manifesto files are called, and is limited to at most eight characters in the ASCII A-Z range.
The displayName property provides a name by which the project is referred to in the RallySportED-js UI. Since this string is not limited in length or character set, it can be more descriptive than the base internalName one. However, it's not supported by the rest of the RallySportED toolset and so is lost when the track is exported into the normal RallySportED project format.
The width and height properties describe the track's dimensions.
The software 3D renderer
RallySportED-js uses the retro n-gon renderer to reproduce the original look of Rally-Sport in the 3d track editor.
The retro n-gon renderer - forked from RallySportED-js's original renderer, developed into a standalone renderer, then backported into RallySportED-js - is a custom software 3d engine capable of natively rendering Rally-Sport's n-sided polygons onto a HTML5 canvas.
Below is a 3d model of a rock from the game as rendered in RallySportED-js. Its mesh consists of four- and five-sided polygons that were rasterized directly without intervening triangulation.
The renderer also reproduces Rally-Sport's somewhat quirky style of texture-mapping, where texture coordinates are derived from the screen-space coordinates of the polygon's vertices; resulting in noticeable warping of the texture dependent on e.g. the viewing angle.
Below is a series of images of a texture-mapped polygon demonstrating the texture-warping effect. The upper-right vertex of the polygon is successively raised, resulting in progressively increasing warping of the texture.
To see why this happens, consider that the texture's v coordinate is derived from the polygon's height in screen space so that v equals 0 at the highest vertex and 1 at the lowest vertex; and the u coordinate from the length of each horizontal pixel span of the polygon on-screen so that u equals 0 at the left end of the span and 1 at the right end.
Authors and credits
The principal author of RallySportED-js is the one-man Tarpeeksi Hyvae Soft (see on GitHub and the Web).
RallySportED-js makes use of JSZip and FileSaver.js. DOSBox-in-browser functionality is provided by js-dos.
The implementation of the Bresenham line algo in js/rallysported/render/line-draw.js has been adapted, with changes, from the one given by Phrogz on Stack Overflow.
The browser icons used in the Browser compatibility section come from alrra's Browser Logos repository. Their use here is purely for visual effect and carries no implication of endorsement, certification, etc.
The OS icons used in the Browser compatibility section come from EgoistDeveloper's operating-system-logos repository. Their use here is purely for visual effect and carries no implication of endorsement, certification, etc.