Tutorials

Using The Ins2Ope Toolkit:

This tool is NOT part of the N3 Sandbox but was written by Ton Fastwalker specifically at a request of the track editors here at CRHQ. It can be used to convert an inserts.txt file generated by 3doEd to the format that OPE understands and used to load objects. It is a suplement to the trk2sg tool and makes rebuilding tracks with new options even easier.

[You need to have the Ins2ope Toolbox installed]
[You need to have 3doEd installed]

Preparations:

Download the Ins2ope toolbox and extract to a folder on your hard drive called ins2ope.

Getting Inserts.txt And Converting To Ope.txt:

1. Open the the <track>.3do in 3doEd in click File > List Inserts, this will list all the objects names, positions and rotations into a file called inserts.txt
2. Copy this inserts.txt file to your Ins2Ope folder;
3. Run the ins2ope.bat file, this will create a file called ope.txt
4. Copy ope.txt to your OPE working folder.

Using Ope.txt In OPE:

First make sure you have put all the TSO objects of the track where you made the inserts.txt from, into your OPE working folder, as well as all the .mip files of course. Then:

1. Start up OPE and press F1.
2. Choose option 3 and type the name ope.txt
3. When you press Enter all the objects should be loaded.

If there are too many to load, OPE will crash and you will need to go back and remove entries from ope.txt. When there are not too many files in ope.txt there might still be the odd error message but most likely OPE will display this message on screen and more detailed info will be in the error.out file that OPE writes every session. Then you can remove the faults in the file or if there's an object that OPE doesn't like maybe remove that one altogether. This is where the other two tools come in:

Using FixOpe.exe:

OK, so your ope.txt has too many entries in it and OPE will not load any of them because of it. Well, open up the ope.txt in a text editor and remove the odd line here and there. A tree here, a bush there, etc. The little things that will be missed the least. So no removing grandstands or pit buildings at this stage ! When you're down to about 500 files save the file... but now the file count is all wrong. Here fixope comes to the rescue. Run fixope on your ope.txt file and it will produce a file called newope.txt. This will have the numbering corrected. You can rename it to ope.txt and load it into OPE to test if it works. Not yet ? Remove another one or two file entries and run fixope again. One thing to be careful about is to have no empty lines in the ope.txt.

Another functionality in fixope is that you can add lines as well, in any place you like, as long as you name them __TSO00. When running fixope it will fix the numbering on these lines as well. Might come in handy when you want two trucks somewhere, instead of the one in the original track. Then you can reposition them [although staying close to the spot where you put them or they will be drawn wrong in the
game] either in OPE while building the track, or in 3doEd when the track has been built already.

When the amount of files left to be removed in ope.txt is small then removing them by hand and running fixope afterwards is your best choice. But what if you need to remove 200 files ? Like I needed to do in Zandvoort ? Here is where retsope will come in handy:

Using RetsOpe.exe:

You can use this tool te remove whole entries from the ope.txt file.You can do this by:

1. Typing the exact names of the entries to be removed in the Remmatch.ini file;
2. Typing a string into Remlike.ini, removing all files with that string in them.

So in option 1, typing "single1" will only remove all entries of object single1.3do but in option 2, typing single will remove all entries of objects that have single in them. So single1.3do, single2.3do, etc.

In those two .ini files there are some bogus names that will likely never be in any track but so you can still see the format in which to type in the names of the lines to be removed. Then run the tool and it will remove those lines and renumber all the lines. So you don't need to run fixope to do the renumbering ! Retsope will already have fixed this !

Back in OPE, if there are no longer any error messages and all the objects are in place after loading then press F1 again, this time choosing option 1 to recalculate the drawing order. If you're not completely happy with their positions or rotations do some editing. When you are finally happy with the end result save your file and exit. Build a .3do with the new .3d file and you're done.