What's the best way to edit something without breaking anything?

I was trying to edit the engine for the pigeon and three out of the four times I tried to change it the car just wouldn't even spawn in, and the forth time it spawned it but the car didn't seem any different other than the texture being missing and considering I put over twenty times the normal torque in it you think I would have noticed a difference, I tried both engines I think, but they both seemed normal. I don't know what I did wrong, I was using the same method that I used to edit the cannon and that mostly worked fine(I think the hydraulics didn't work), so I don't really know what I did wrong.
Edit: I unzipped east coast usa and it didn't work at all then re-zipped it and it was still broke so I think the way that I'm decompressing the files is wrong or something

 

Have you been over here yet? http://www.beamng.com/threads/tutorial-vehicle-performance-and-components-modification-simple.4261/

 

Use Notepad++
It makes it easier to manage and harder to make a mistake, although this will only make it somewhat easier

 

Thanks, I didn't know about that thread I was trying to use the tutorial on the wiki for making a whole new car and couldn't find much that would help

 

You're welcome. Slayersen's advice would also be good to heed. If you're currently using notepad or wordpad you should definitely switch to a more advanced text editor, even just for small edits. I recently switched from PSPad to to Notepad++ myself and I'm impressed. PSPad does do a lot of the same things, but Notepad++ is what I'd recommend so far.

Any text editor which offers what's called syntax highlighting will help keep you from making hard-to-find typos. Obviously both Slayersen and I are recommending Notepad++, it offers syntax highlighting for both formats BeamNG uses (JSON and LUA). For the files you want to edit you'd go to the language menu and select J->JSON. For markup files like these the highlighting mostly helps to prevent deleting important punctuation (brackets, semicolons, etc). Once you switch you'll understand how useful this really is.. and you'll almost certainly find other 'advanced' features useful as well.

 

Not to mention that double clicking characters inside quotations or brackets will auto select the words/numbers where other word processors just select a heap of useless crap.

Good for fast edits.


And it supports Find and Replace with many features allowing you to change the name of a node and all corresponding beams in one jbeam file.

Press [CTRL+F to open this feature, try it for yourself, eventually you'll be glad to have learnt of it's existence]

Useful for quick edits mmm?

 

All true, just know that replace-all is a powerful tool and should be wielded carefully.

 

I've been planning on installing notepad++ on this computer, I've just been lazy and didn't know it had a thing for Json files, hopefully that will help, although I'm not sure if that would help with textures missing when I edit something.

 

All you have to do is double check things like..

"Case Sensitive" and "In Selection"

..based on what your use is.

If you do make a mistake just remind yourself to double check for errors like replacing a whole file with something instead of just inside a given selection.

This tool is most useful for me when converting left side nodes/beams over to right and vice versa.


Not to mention the more powerful undo hotkey.

 

I unzipped east coast usa and it didn't work at all then re-zipped it and it was still broke so I think the way that I'm decompressing the files is wrong or something.