How to make national licence plates

[grega]

Hi,
I would like to know how to make new licence plates for new countries? Is there any good guidebook? Can someone give me some instructions and show or describe how is it done? Any help will be good, thanks.

[grega]

I somehow managed to make this:


But its obvious that I messed something, any idea how to make it as it should be?

[ScuL]

There are many different steps towards doing this, I don't have time to explain it now but I will post some info tomorrow

[grega]

OK thanks for now

[ScuL]

Step 1 - making the license plate texture

Create a folder for the country code in \material\ui\lp, so for Croatia you would make \material\ui\lp\hr

Inside this folder you have to create the following materials:

• front.mat
• rear.mat
• trailer.mat
• truck_front.mat
• truck_rear.mat

The materials should be self-explanatory. Either they can all point to the same TOBJ (front.tobj) or you make different TOBJ's if the colours of the plates need to be different based on the vehicle type.

Then of course front.tobj should point to front.dds which is the license plate textures (128x32 DDS DXT5)

Step 2 - defining the font

Font needs to be defined in \font\license_plate
The naming here is a bit inconsistent

hr.font would be the Croatian font file
DDS/TOBJ/MAT are defined by country code and underscore 0 as such:
hr_0.dds
hr_0.mat
hr_0.tobj

Mat needs to point to the TOBJ, TOBJ to the DDS.
The DDS contains all characters of the font in graphics (look at the others for examples)

Now the hard part is making the font file, follow the instructions given in it, but basically you need to define every X and Y coordinate for every character and match it to the ASCII code. Then secondly you will also need to ensure that the "writing pen" moves forward the correct number of pixels for every character that is displayed. This is a nightmare to configure especially because you have to restart ETS2 hundreds of times to test the result.

Step 3 - making the def files

In def\country you make croatia.sii and define the country settings, then create a subfolder called croatia
Inside you will find license_plates.sii

Here you need to define the license plates based on the format of the correct vehicle type

Code: Select all

license_plate_data : .lp.car
{
	type: car

	templates[]:"011 222"

	def0[]:"A"
	def0[]:"B"
	def0[]:"C"
	def0[]:"D"
	def0[]:"E"
	def0[]:"F"
	def0[]:"G"
	def0[]:"H"
	def0[]:"J"

	def1[]:"A"	
	def1[]:"B"
	def1[]:"C"
	def1[]:"D"
	def1[]:"E"
	def1[]:"F"
	def1[]:"G"
	def1[]:"H"
	def1[]:"I"
	def1[]:"J"
	def1[]:"K"
	def1[]:"L"
	def1[]:"M"
	def1[]:"N"
	def1[]:"O"
	def1[]:"P"
	def1[]:"Q"
	def1[]:"R"
	def1[]:"S"
	def1[]:"T"
	def1[]:"U"
	def1[]:"V"
	def1[]:"W"
	def1[]:"X"
	def1[]:"Y"
	def1[]:"Z"

	def2[]:"0"
	def2[]:"1"
	def2[]:"2"
	def2[]:"3"
	def2[]:"4"
	def2[]:"5"
	def2[]:"6"
	def2[]:"7"
	def2[]:"8"
	def2[]:"9"
}

}

This means that the first character will be selected from the array def0 (A until J), the second and third character from array def 1, then a space and then three digits (from array def2).

Hope this makes sense

It's a lot of work.

[grega]

First thank you for the explanation. Here is the improoved version. As you can see, now the texture is made, just the coat of arms is a bit in bad resolution. Some said that its better to extract the coat of arms sign and then point to it. I also changed the format of licence plates in def file (it is also wrong in Promods def file) - here is the older version still. Now the only thing besides making the font bigger and thicker, is to split up the city code from other parts of letters + numbers. So it need to be like this: 00 (city code) ___ (coat of arms) 111 (numbers) - 22 (letters). Maybe I could have a look at german and austrian, also slovenian LP's, beause they are quite similar by format.
To make this, everything is explained above, right?

[Vladzz-G]

I'd recomend you to look at italian LP's font. It should be more similar.
Just extract base.scs file by any special program (e.g. ETS2Studio), and you can find, what you need and use it as example for your mod. Here you can find SCS' license plates files.

[grega]

Yes yes I know how to extract those file, I have done it before

[ScuL]

First thank you for the explanation. Here is the improoved version. As you can see, now the texture is made, just the coat of arms is a bit in bad resolution. Some said that its better to extract the coat of arms sign and then point to it. I also changed the format of licence plates in def file (it is also wrong in Promods def file) - here is the older version still. Now the only thing besides making the font bigger and thicker, is to split up the city code from other parts of letters + numbers. So it need to be like this: 00 (city code) ___ (coat of arms) 111 (numbers) - 22 (letters). Maybe I could have a look at german and austrian, also slovenian LP's, beause they are quite similar by format.
To make this, everything is explained above, right?

You can improve the quality of the coat of arms by resizing differently. I feel that the lines are blurry too because of this.
It's possible to make a coat of arms flexible (look at the plates for Switzerland), however then the coat of arms will move and is never in the same position, I would not recommend it for the Croatian plates.

So your code should be
0 111-22 (three spaces in the middle)
where 0 is an array defined as "ZG", "RI", etc.
where 1 is array 0 to 9
where 2 is array A to Z excluding illegal characters

Without the correct font file the game will render in 8-bit console type as on your screenshot.
You could try out copying a font from a different country to test it .

[lolnoobhax]

The materials should be self-explanatory. Either they can all point to the same TOBJ (front.tobj) or you make different TOBJ's if the colours of the plates need to be different based on the vehicle type.

So, it's not possible to make sure the design is sticked to specific plates? (as in, 2 types for cars depending on what the plate index will be)

In Belgium we have some special license plates, one type for example is the Zed plates like we call them. These plates are used for commercial and dealer use of any kind. What I've been doing so far in the sii file is making sure there are green plates and that they spawn rarely on some cars, because when you drive your car to the garage and they work on it and either make a test drive or go to the technical checkup with it, the garage uses these green Zed plates on them.

So I was kind of interested in making the plates entirely green, because right now You can edit the color trough the .sii file in the country folder, but the stamp will still be red.

Another example would be old timers, since 2014 vanity old timer plates here have a "big" red stamp saying OLDTIMER on it, only on the vanity versions that is because the none customised start with an O with the regular stamp behind it now anyway.

Also is there any place to find out what vehicle types can be used in that sii file? so far i've been writing it behind its extention as I've added taxi's and motorcycles, even tho that class isn't in the game, obviously, and you won't see them unless if I would ever get to understand how to add new vehicletypes to them that is.


Thanks in advance!