Managing Dat Files:

Most of the files in Papyrus simulations are stored in .dat files. Whether it be carsets, tracks or sounds, most of the time you can not edit them directly. Instead the files are safely hidden away in the .dat files. Think of .dat files as .zip or .rar archives but with no compression.

A number of tools have been written to open and extract existing .dat files and to make brand new ones. The older [mostly DOS based] tools all used a .txt file with which a new .dat was built. This meant that you needed to edit the .txt every time you added a file to [or deleted a file from] the .dat. file. So in my own opinion the most convenient of all tools is by far a Windows tool called DooDat, created by Tim Medcalf. You can use it to extract one, multiple or all files from a .dat archive and the best thing is that it does not use a text file so you can just point it to a folder and tell it to add the files inside it to a .dat. This makes for much faster editing. The only place I know of where you can download this great tool at the moment is Mistycreek's TrackShoppe, the utilities page to be exact. Go there, download and install it. If you get an option during installation to let DooDAT functionality be added to your right-click menu, click yes. I can't remember exactly if it asks this but make sure it gets added !

Now, let's say you want to edit Elkhart Lake so you want to unpack the elkhart.dat file :

1. Copy the elkhart.dat file and rename the copy to elkhart.old [for backup purposes];

2. Create a new folder called temp;

3. Move the elkhart.dat file to the temp folder;

5. Right-click on elkhart.dat and choose "extract DAT". All files should be extracted by DooDAT;

6. Delete elkhart.dat because you now have all the files in a folder from which the new .dat will be made. Plus, you still have the old .dat safely backed up in its original folder;

7. Now, edit everything you wanted to edit;

8.When you are done editing, right-click on the temp folder and pick "add to temp.dat". This will put all the files in that folder into a file called temp.dat in the original elkhart folder;

9. So the only thing left to do is rename temp.dat to elkhart.dat and you can test the changes in the game.

There is one imoprtant thing you need to know about .dat files. Whenever there are more than 300 files inside an ICR2 .dat file the game will not load. When your track uses more than 300 files you are better off getting rid of the <track>.dat altogther and just putting all the track files in the <track> folder. I have needed to do that in a couple of GPL converted tracks to keep the amount of detail in the track but still have it load in the game. The track folder will get messy with all the files in there but it works.