HELP with .3do gauges?

[Roaddog]

Hello! I need a bit of some quick advice for those of you that have done some work with compiling mod 3dos.

Long story short, I want to take an object (face + material) and place it onto another existing .3do, with the correct face textures being called upon loading.
I want to try and put PWF's 3D gauges from the IROC mod onto the PWF CTS trucks. The reason is, my adjusted FOV is pretty narrow on my ultrawide rig, limiting my peripheral vision to the dashboard itself - I can't really see any column-mounted tachs now, like the ones featured on the CTS and the default Cup mod.

Attached below explains my situation. Keep in mind, this is with the camera's seat position WAAAY back in an attempt to see the tach, to no avail.




It's not ideal, that's for sure. Lol

Here are the IROC gauges that I had in mind, seen on IROC's make_a_gns.3do - I think that I can adjust the needle positions properly (given that the old GaugeWorks program hopefully won't poop out on my Windows 11 machine)




...but, trying to add these faces and textures myself hasn't done me any favors so far, and is resulting in a crash each time. I'm not a modeler by any means, I'm not gonna pretend like I am, so I'm absolutely doing something VERY wrong here.

Any help is greatly, greatly appreciated. I feel like this is definitely easier than I'm thinking it is, I am just having a hard time making it work myself with 3DSimED.


Here is a (lazy) Photoshop mockup of what I'm trying to do - with the IROC gauges on the PWF CTS cockpit.





Again, any help would be greatly, greatly appreciated! I've been trying to do this for a while, and it's kinda boiled down to frustration at this point.
If there are any tips I should know or if somebody could help me out, I won't be able to thank you enough! <

Thank you so much!

 

[Mystical]

The cockpit interior (including the gauges and needles) is one element of an entire mod that includes all the exterior data and rear-view mirror details. The exterior gauges is a separate 3do 'make_a_light_cockpit.3do' which is entirely separate code.

The only way to make new cockpit gauges would be to recompile an entire mod by editing the original psg data and mesh file into a new PAS for needle positions along with the new backplate gauge positions. 3D SimEd3 is not a viable program in editing a 3do, when a 3do is re-saved it strips all the mod's original 3do scripting rendering it useless to the game.

Needle positions are positioned in a 3d scene (blender or 3ds max) at 0,0,0 with a 90 degree rotation to the right and then in the psg script (in meters for position) adjusted where they belong. For the gauges that also light up when hitting their limit you'd need to create and reposition those elements to their new locations too.


For example the RPM tach code I wrote for ICR mod:

needle_RPM: TRANSFORM NAME ptach POS(0.257, 0.492, 0.4) ROT(0, 0, 0) Large_Needle
needle_RPM_digital: SELFLIGHTING AMBIENT(1, 1, 1)   needle_RPM

Gauge_rev_digital: SELFLIGHTING AMBIENT(1, 1, 1)   Gauge_rev

 RPM_Light: STATE_SWITCH VAR tachLightEnable (0 needle_RPM_digital, 1 Gauge_rev_digital, 2)

 

[Roaddog]

Yeah, I kinda figured that I was really shootin myself in the foot trying to get 3DSimED to do some actual heavy lifting with Nr2003. I think it'll probably just be way easier to assign a PWF GNS style dash configuration (no 3D gauges aside from the tach) so that I don't have to get the other materials (fuelpress.mip, etc) involved - just working with what's already called by the 3do by default.

I'll try and see how much of the GNS tach verticies data and needle positions will easily carry over to the truck's model. Thank you so much for your insight @Mystical!

 

[Roaddog]

Slowly but surely getting there! I decided to go for the Cup90/CTS09 dash layout since it'd be much more fitting.
Easy part is done. Now for that pesky tach...