Textures:

Now that you have a fully working track with objects it's time to put in some nice textures.

[You need a good image editing program]
[You need WinMip or WinMip2]

Maybe you had already decided on the track surface and wall textures before you went into OPE to put in the TSO's and TSD's. That's good because then you can just stick to the sunny.pcx from that track and make the rest of the textures fit that palette. Maybe you took ALL objects from that same track as I suggested in the OPE tutorial and then it's even easier, the textures will look just as good as in that other track, as long as you are using that track's palette as well.

But, what if you took objects and surface textures from all kinds of different tracks ? The colors will look all wrong on the textures that you brought in from tracks other than the one you copied the sunny.pcx from. What can you do to bring back the right colors ?

Well, let's say you took an asphalt texture from Atlanta and a grass texture from Michigan. You used the sunny.pcx from Atlanta [a very wise choice because the asphalt texture is probably the most important texture in your track] so the asphalt texture looks perfect but now the colors of the grass.mip are all wrong because it still uses the old IMS palette. This is how you can fix that:

1. Go into your paint program [Paint Shop Pro seems to be the track editors tool of choice, well at least it is mine] and open your new track's sunny.pcx [the one from Atlanta]. Choose the option to save the palette and save it to something like new_track.pal

2. Convert the original IMS grass.mip and your new grass.mip to grass.bmp with WinMip.

3. Open the original IMS grass.bmp in Paint Shop Pro and choose Load Palette. Pick the new_track.pal file [make sure that nearest color matching is checked] and hit enter. Now your IMS grass.mip will be converted to the new palette.

4. Copy and paste this to your new grass.mip, save and convert it back to grass.mip.

You can repeat the same proces for other textures that use a different palette then the sunny.pcx in your new track.

ICR2 Colors:

Now, when you are running the track in Nascar 3 I have no idea if there will be any palette issues. For the DOS version of ICR2 there will not be because the DOS version uses the whole palette. But when you are using Windy there will be color problems if you are using textures that were 'converted' in the way described above. I will deal with correcting those in a later tutorial because at this point we are still editing the track in Nascar 3 format.