[Deji]

Okay, go download a copy of IMGTool and SAMI. When you've downloaded and installed these go mod hunting! Find yourself a car that replaces say a Clover or something... Once you've got a nice mod, download it to a rememberable place! That means download it to a place where you aren't gonna forget where you put it...

After you've got everything downloaded, there are two ways two install your car... The first is to simply use SAMI...


The SAMI Way

Just right-click the zip or rar file containing your mod... This file MUST contain a .dff file and a .txd file! Then click Install with SAMI. SAMI will take you past a few pages. You MUST check the README.txt file for any lines of numbers though! Say if there were a few numbers for carcols, replace them with the carcols line in SAMI. You do not have to replace the handling lines but it is reccommended for now and this just makes your cars handling whatever the modder decided to have it.

If you extracted your files into a folder, then you'll have to open SAMI and find the folder instead of right-clicking the zip/rar files...

Play San Andreas!


The other way is the manual way and sometimes the harder way. It takes a few more minutes but it should become easy after a while...


The Manual Way

Open up the powerful IMGTool and find your gta3.img file... Wait a few secs and IMG tool will show you everything in the file. Click edit and click find and search for the name of the car you want to replace. This can be any car as long as it's a car! Replace cars with cars, boats with boats ect...

Once you're highlighting the cars name. click on the one that has .dff at the end...

Right click this file and click 'Replace' - Then select where your mod is located. Once you are at your mods location, click the "carname".dff file and click open.

Repeat the last step with the .txd file and replace with the other .txd file.

Play San Andreas and see if anything works!

[Adler]

How about carcols.dat and handling.cfg tutorials?

I prefer IMG Manager by Xmen for its Bulk Replace feature allowing you to import multiple files like radar textures (argh! 144 files!) from a folder which eliminates the trouble of having to do them one by one with IMG Tool.

Also, a tutorial by 2pac on Adding instead of Replacing cars. My preferred method for adding vehicles.

GTAF - 2pacproducer's TUT on Adding Cars

EDIT - Spider-Vice mentioned another IMG Editor below which removes the need to rebuild the IMG. But since you can't rebuild the archive you can't add new vehicles. If you don't plan to add vehicles with 2pac's tutorial then using Spark would be better I guess.

This post has been edited by Adler: Aug 18 2009, 05:42 PM

[Spider-Vice]

Yep, nice. But I wouldn't recommend SAMI to anyone. It sucks and it corrupts certain files with its weird mod installing engine. I'd recommend manual.

But best IMG Editor ever is Spark IMG Editor. You can drag files directly to the file and you don't need to rebuild the file. Just click Save and you're done. 1sec to save or a bit more for many files.

[Adler]

Yep, nice. But I wouldn't recommend SAMI to anyone. It sucks and it corrupts certain files with its weird mod installing engine. I'd recommend manual.

Yeah, I agree. And besides, you don't learn anything by letting a program automate the process.

But best IMG Editor ever is Spark IMG Editor. You can drag files directly to the file and you don't need to rebuild the file. Just click Save and you're done. 1sec to save or a bit more for many files.

I just looked it up and it says it uses the space from previously deleted files to add new files so you don't have to rebuild.

Since it uses space from deleted files, adding vehicles could be a problem because Spark removed the Rebuild Archive function. So that means if I wanted to add new vehicles instead of replacing them I can't because rebuilding the archive is not available with Spark. I guess I'll stick to the IMG Manager then for adding vehicles.

And the Replace feature in IMG Manager also removes the need to rebuild so I'll only have to rebuild when I add new vehicles.

This post has been edited by Adler: Aug 18 2009, 05:47 PM

[Spider-Vice]

Well but I always use Spark and I never had any problems. Thus the max size of an img file is 3GB
Edit: Whoa! IMG Manager is awesome actually. I never tried it but I guess it overtakes Spark 10000 times.