Doom 3©, GTA© San Andreas, FSX© modifications, mapper, content creator & scripter (shader)

2004 was the year of two interesting games (interesting games for me). In March 2004, Crytek© released Far Cry® and in August 2004 id-Software© released Doom3©. Far Cry© achieved the same great „island- & holiday-feeling” as Crysis© 3 years later. But for whatever reason I never had any interest in modding it. Maybe it was because of its boring story (in my opinion) and/or the partially uninteresting maps. My Doom3©-modding work is worth mentioning though, because it walked in the old Quake 3 Arena© footsteps. When the game was launched, I immediately “fell in love” with the graphics and

So the year 2004 passed by and I was looking forward to the year 2005. The next GTA©-title “San Andreas” was announced for June. I told you before that I was not satisfied with my Chargers and Cudas for previous GTA titles. And it was much worse when I came back to modelling in GTA San Andreas© and took a look at them. I remember very welld when I loaded the cars into the ZModeler and moved them in the viewport… The more I compared them to the photographs, the more differences and mistakes I found. Because of this realization, I removed them all and started a completely new build from scratch for all of them. With this decision, my library grew, because I am firmly convinced that books are much better than internet sources. Although many important cars were owned by our US-Car-Club members, the books helped me in

many cases. And well, I like reading. GTA© San Andreas Shortly after the release of GTA© San Andreas I played the whole game and still loved it. Later in the year 2005 I started the creation of my first GTA©-cars completely from scratch a second time. Because of many new modelling features in ZModeler2©, I purchased this program (the ZModeler1© had been free, years ago). The newly created meshes looked much better than the old ones and I was very motivated to work forward. Additional I got more motivation from our German US-Car- Club „Sundaycruiser“. We had many new members now, with new cars and so I had access to many more classical and modern US-Cars as a source. With this option I was able to create many new textures and better blueprints for my 3D- models. Now I want to start backwards, in the sequence of pictures. At first the latest car I created, the 1979 Dodge Coronet©.

Titan Quest© After the release and a little bit of playing of the game „Titan Quest©“ in June 2006, I got interested in its modding. Titan Quest© is a role playing game and I liked the option to create custom maps and items, and the possibility to modify the enemies to really big and strong hordes. For me it was modification for private fun, like to run a machine into 1000 enemies, or to create map environments how I wanted. So, Titan Quest© is also worth a mention in this period. Well, after I found out how it worked, agin the modding drew my interest more than the playing. So I spent around 6 months (besides the other projects) to mod Titan Quest©. Later down the road, many professional mods were released (like the „Chuck Norris“ one) and I slowly lost interest in modding Titan Quest©. Although I spent more than a half year with its modding, I don’t have many pictures to show. It was a purely personal project. Additionally a few pictures from a tutorial I have written (which I will not publish).

Microsoft© Flight Simulator X (FSX) Yes, although many people laugh about flight simulations, I like them a lot. My first simulator was the Microsoft© Flight Simulator 2000 (the edition with the big „pilot book“). I rarely fly but from time to time I still do it today.

What I did I do? In the beginning of FSX, optimization was the most important job. In our community that we founded as www.fs-flightcrew.de (which was unfortunately closed a few years later), we worked out many tweaks and improved the performance for the badly running game (bad FPS). After that I wrote many tutorials and later navigation workshops, for the „real“ flight route programming in pay-ware planes with the FMC (Flight Management Console), based on officially released flight charts. The next interesting thing was, that many users released real world terrain meshes, with satellite pictures as textures. The VFR-flights (Visual Flight Rules) were very, very great on those terrains. You can download my files in the download area, if you like. In the middle of 2007, I started to create a custom Boeing© 737 but stopped the work in November with the release of Crysis©.

Before the Coronet, I wanted to create my own Viper GTS®. The one that had been converted for GTA3© and GTA Vice City© was very successful and I still loved this car but it hadn’t been created by me. So this was the second last car I built for the GTA© series.

As I have written above, I recreated all Dodge Charger© and Plymouth Cuda©. The next 3 pictures show you the 1968 Dodge Charger©, which contained the headlight covers as „extra“ (a new game-option).

In memory of the really great movie „Bullit“ with Steve McQueen, I created a special version of this car too.

The 1969 and 1970 Dodge Charger© shared the same body and so it wasn’t much effort to implement the needed modifications to the 1968 version.

In the same way as the Dodge Chargers©, I started the new build of the Plymouth Cudas© from scratch and created the 1970, 1971 convertible and 1972 version.

Last but not least, I created a very special version of the „Viper©“. When I finished the car, I called it „Viper X²“. The reason behind this is: if I was a real car designer, I would have designed the Viper in an extreme race version. I gave my best to create it in 3D and hopefully got a very race-looking result. The car is based on a mix of the Viper GTS©, a few Viper©- prototypes, the Viper Competition Coupé© and the new Viper SRT 10©. People liked it but the more time went on, the more dissatisfied I was with this car. But I never had the heart to delete it in the same way as the old GTA Vice City© cars before.

environment. The dark horror atmosphere „invited” me to tweak the weapon- and projectile-scripts at first, although I played just the first levels. Similar to Quake 3 Arena©, the Doom3-engine© stored the game data in packed files and as a result it was possible to unpack them, which allowed their modification. I changed the scripts of most of the weapons (*.def - files) to emit projectile-lights when these were fired. Ingame it looks really great, because when you fire for example the plasma gun, the projectile lights create their own atmosphere in the small corridors. Very great experience! With Doom3© I got back a game-feeling like I had in the old Resident Evil© games. Later, in a few mapping projects, I combined the experience of emitting light through projectiles and the „zombie-feeling”. Otherwise in the years after my GTA©-modding, I didn’t work much on modifications and I wasn´t involved in many projects. Just in a few small ones. Mostly the projects broke up shortly after their founding. The biggest one was the first „Resident Evil©”-mod. For this I created a car (Crown Victoria Police car) but just before I finished it, the project was given up.

The first book I bought is a very huge collection of historical cars, in „blueprint“-ready photographs. You can confidently ignore the German language of the book if you need primary the pictures. In my opinion a „must have“ for car modellers. Hardcover: 576 pages Publisher: Coventgarden (2002) Language: German Buy this book at Amazon.de (Germany) Buy this book at Amazon.co.uk (UK) Buy this book at Amazon.com (USA)

For the Dodge Viper©, I bought a very great book of Dodge´s© history. It contains much information from the early time in the 20th century, up until the Dodge Viper. The book were released in English and German. Hardcover: 152 pages Publisher: Delius Klasing (Jan 2006) Language English Buy this book at Amazon.de (Germany) Language: German! Buy this book at Amazon.de (Germany) Buy this book at Amazon.com (USA)

„The roaring 60´s“ means nothing more than cubic capacity and 8 cylinders. The era of muscle cars is unique and the birth time of many great cars. The book below contains a lot of helpful background information and pictures. Hardcover: 350 pages (German) Publisher: Heel (DE) (16. Sept 2005) Hardcover: 352 pages (UK & USA) Publisher: Motorbooks Int (2004 & 2006) The description on Amazon.de describe the language as „Dutch“ but it is the German edition. In doubt please contact the seller for the right language. Language: English Buy this book at Amazon.co.uk (UK) Buy this book at Amazon.com (USA) Language: German! Buy this book at Amazon.de (Germany)

My next book is about one decade before the muscle cars and contains all the earlier beautiful American cars that never ever were built again. Hardcover: 631 pages Publisher: Heel (2005) Language: German! Buy this book at Amazon.de (Germany) Buy this book at Amazon.co.uk (UK) Buy this book at Amazon.com (USA)

To round out my collection of books, I bought the next one because of its mainly technical information of American cars of the 50´s. Paperback: 130 pages Verlag: Heel Language: German! Buy this book at Amazon.de (Germany)

Last but not least, I recommend a very great book about the history of cars. It contains a lot of information & interesting materials about the „automobile“. Hardcover: 380 pages Publisher: Campus (16. Sept 2002) Language: German! Buy this book at Amazon.de (Germany) Buy this book at Amazon.co.uk (UK) Buy this book at Amazon.com (USA)

Please note that I spent a long time on the recreation of the „High-Impact-Colors©“, like „Hemi-Orange“, „Sassy Grass Green“, „Plum Crazy“, „Lemon Twist“ and so on and so forth. To implement the best result ingame, I evaluated more than 20 old color shards and original cars from meetings and club members.

It doesn´t matter how old you are and what you love. I promise you will like the 10 minutes car chase in San Francisco, if you watch the movie.