Hi all! As someone who has made more configurations than I'd like to admit, I thought I'll make a tutorial on how to make a configuration in BeamNG. This includes vehicle description and performance stats too! Now, I must admit: this tutorial is quite long, but the only reason for that is because it is aimed at beginners who have never made a configuration before, so if you know the basic stuff you can skip a few steps here and there. Also, I would refer to configurations as "configs" from this point onwards for this tutorial, since it's much easier to type out. This tutorial is split into 3 parts, which are, as follows: How to create a config and save it How to make a vanilla-like thumbnail for your config How to add a description and basic performance stats to your config Part 1Obviously, you have to spawn up an existing vehicle first. For the purpose of tutorial, I'm using an Ibishu 200BX as an example, but you can use any vehicle you want. After you finish customizing/modifying your preferred vehicle, go to the "Save & Load" tab in the Parts Selector (aka Ctrl+W). Here, you'll see something similar to the screenshot on the right (don't worry if your list doesn't look exactly like mine, I do have some mods installed). Now you have to come up with a name for your config. IMPORTANT: make sure that you give your config a unique name! You do NOT want to end up naming your config the same name as an existing one, or else it will probably cause major conflict within the game. Say you made a drift car, and naturally, you'll want to name your config "drift". However, if the vehicle itself already has an existing drift config (like the vanilla 200BX drift car), then that config has the identical config name. Perhaps you could slightly change your config's name to "mydrifter" or "customdriftcar" or something. Also, (I think) all of the vanilla "Street Tuned" configs have the name "custom", so don't name your config that either. And try to not use spaces when naming your config, use dashes or hyphens instead. A good way of checking if your config's name overlaps with an existing config's name is by looking out for "Load" buttons as you type it in. If there are no "Load" buttons left after you finished typing in your config's name, then it means that the name is unrepeated with other configs'. In short, you're good to go. As you can see with the screenshot on the left, my 200BX config name "junkyard_drifter" is unique, because there are no "Load" buttons. Once you're sure that your config's name is unique, hit "Save". You should see the camera zoom in for a second before returning to normal. This is because the game is generating a thumbnail for your config. You should now be able to see your config in the vehicle selector (under your vehicle, so in my case, it will be under the 200BX in the vehicle selector). If you can't see it, go to the top of the menu -> Options -> User Interface -> tick the box labeled "Show custom configs in vehicle selector". Part 2OK, so you've successfully created your very own config. Great! But there's a good chance that you want to make a better thumbnail for it. I mean… To make a thumbnail like the default configs, we'll have to pull up the Showroom map. For those of you who have never used the showroom map before, this is what it looks like when you first spawn there: Here, you should see a widget named "Showroom Tools". You can use your mouse to drag it around the screen. Showroom Tools has 2 buttons you can click: Switch Background -- this will change the background color between black and white. We'll use the default white background for now, so just leave that button alone. If you really want your thumbnail to have a black background, go ahead I guess. Thumbnail Generator -- this is what we're going to use to make the thumbnail for the config. Click it. A larger widget should pop up, and it looks something like this (you can drag this as well): As one can see, there are 2 lists, one on each side of the widget. This is a list of every single spawn-able thing in BeamNG, so that includes vehicles AND props. Now, you may be wondering: why are there 2 names for each thing? Well, let me explain… In BeamNG, the names you see in-game are what I like to call "displayed names". For example, "Gavril Barstow", "Travel Trailer", and "ETK I-Series". However, if you ever looked into the game files or mod files before, you may have noticed that the names aren't exactly the same as the "displayed names". Using the same examples, "Gavril Barstow" is just "barstow", "Travel Trailer" is "caravan", and "ETK I-Series" is "etki". These shortened names are what I like to call "internal names". So, back to the thumbnail generator. The list on the left is a list of the "internal names", while the list on the right is a list of their corresponding "displayed names". Luckily, most of the internal names are pretty obvious when it comes to guessing what their displayed counterparts are. But, there is a small handful of not-so-obvious internal names, and I'll list some below. Although they are already matched up for you in the thumbnail generator, I think it's good practice if you learn these. pickup = Gavril D-Series semi = Gavril T-Series fullsize = Gavril Grand Marshal midsize = 2nd gen Ibishu Pessima hatch (this internal name might change with the Covet remaster, who knows) = Ibishu Covet coupe = Ibishu 200BX citybus = Wentward DT40L I might have missed some, but you get the idea, hopefully. OK, back to making thumbnails. Before you do anything else, make sure "Dynamic Reflections" are off. To do this, go to Options -> Graphics -> scroll down and untick the box labelled "Dynamic Reflections". You should notice a change in the way your vehicle looks. The most obvious way to tell the difference (imo) is by looking at the mirrors. left: dynamic reflections on, right: dynamic reflections off At this point, it's a good idea to minimize the main BeamNG window and drag both widgets out of the window. All you have to do next is select the vehicle you want to run thumbnails for. So, in my case, my config is a 200BX, so I'll have to select "coupe" from the list. If you're feeling lazy, you can also just spawn your config and click "Select only current". Then, click on the green triangle, and let the thumbnail generator do its job. This is the most boring step of the process by far, imho. Because of the way BeamNG works as a program, the generator will run thumbnails for ALL of the configs for that vehicle, and if the vehicle has a ton of configs already -- *cough cough* D-Series -- well, it will take quite a while. At least you get to hear a nice 'boop' sound effect when a new thumbnail is generated… After the generator finally stops, close BeamNG. Part 3Before we start to make an "info" file -- this is the JSON or text file that contains your config's description performance stats -- we have to first delete all of the unwanted thumbnails. To do this, we have to navigate to the User Folder (named "BeamNG.drive" in File Explorer). This should be somewhere in the Documents section in File Explorer by default. If you updated the game in the past, you'll probably see a directory named "moved here" when you open the "BeamNG.drive" folder under Documents. Click that, and you should be redirected to this file path: (note: ROG_M15 is just the name of my computer, yours is just what your computer is named) If you moved it somewhere else…well, hopefully you know where that somewhere is. Worst case scenario, if you completely forgot where you moved your User Folder, then you can use the BeamNG launcher to help you out: (simply click the middle option for both interfaces) With that out of the way, you should see something like this in your User Folder: Since you most likely made your config in the most recent game version (don't worry, if you made one in previous game versions it should have been migrated to the 0.24 folder when you updated the game), you should open the 0.24 folder. This should in turn bring up another bunch of folders, something like this: Your config is in the "vehicles folder", so go ahead and open that. (I wasn't kidding when I said earlier that I made way too many configs XD) Now, this is where internal names come in handy. Refer back to some of the stuff in Part 2 if you're a bit lost here. Taking the example of my 200BX config, we should open the vehicle folder labelled "coupe" since that's the internal name for the 200BX. The thumbnail generator got through quite a few configs before it got to my drift beater… Again, the thumbnails you see here might not be the same ones you see, because I have mods installed. Also, I already made 3 configs for the 200BX before I started this tutorial, so there are more text files too. It's worth noting that all the files in the User Folder are listed alphabetically by default. Anyway, this is the thumbnail we want, for my example. (delete the og thumb on the left) Delete all the other unwanted config thumbnails, so you are just left with your config's thumbnail and a PC file. We will leave the PC file untouched for now, but I'll explain what it is. The PC file for your config is basically your config's data file. It contains all the information about your config's parts, tuning setup, paint/colour, and so on so forth. The reason why my PC file has a notebook icon, is literally because I use Notepad to open it by default. You'll have to use Notepad, or better yet, Notepad++ (this one is also used to write jbeam files) to create an info file. Before we start making an info file, let's record some vehicle stats first. The info file includes horsepower numbers, torque numbers, and vehicle weight. To see these numbers, you could spawn a weight-pad in game and driving your config onto it, and bring up the Torquecurve UI app. Then take a screenshot before closing the game. OK, more experienced players will probably remember the exact format of an info file, but since this guide is meant for absolute beginners, we're just going to copy-and-paste an existing info file from the game files. To find the BeamNG game files, follow this file path: Here, you'll see a "vehicles" folder. When you open it, you'll be met by a slew of zipped folders. Again, this is when internal names become really useful, as (like the case with the "vehicle" folder in your User Folder), all the vehicles here are shown with internal names. Because I want to copy an info file for the 200BX in this example, I'll have to open the "coupe" zip. IMPORTANT: for the love of all that's holy, do NOT extract the contents of the zip! You'll see a single folder named "vehicles". Open that. And then you'll see the internal name of the vehicle again, in this case, "coupe". Open that as well. You should see something that looks almost identical to this: Scroll down until you see a bunch of "info_nameofconfig" files. For example, the manual version of the Type-LS would have the info file named "info_type-ls_M". To be fair, when it comes down to choosing which info file you should copy, it doesn't really matter. For my example, I'm copying the one for the automatic version of the Type-L -- "info_type-l_A". Once you've copied an info file from the game files, go back to your vehicle folder in your User Folder and paste it there. For the info file to work, you have to make sure to rename it to "info_yourconfigsname" (the "info_" bit here is a must). Make sure that it's renamed exactly like the name you've given your config earlier. For example, for my drift beater, I have to rename the info file to "info_junkyard_drifter", not "info_junkyard drifter". In short, the only difference between the name of your info file and that of your PC file/thumbnail is the "info_" bit. Alright, you finally got to the fun part: editing the info file itself! When you first open the info file, it should look something like this: Note that it is not necessary to have all of these specs, so let's delete some of these lines so it's slightly more manageable. Just make sure to not delete the curly brackets at the start and end. Curly brackets are these things: { } Make sure that the main text starts directly 1 line below the curly bracket at the top of the page, and the end of the main text is directly 1 line above the other curly bracket. This is what my info file looks like after I cut it down: While this won't exactly be dev-quality, it's a good place to start when you're new to this sort of stuff. Plus, you can always add more performance stats as you become more experienced. All you have to do now is change the numbers so they match your config's. You can refer back to the screenshot you took earlier in-game. Whatever you do, just make sure that you don't delete any commas, colons, or quotation marks, and whatever you rewrite should be within the quotation marks (if there are quotation marks). Most of these stats are pretty straightforward in meaning. The "Value" number determines how far down your config will be in the vehicle selector. The higher the "Value" number, the further down your config will be, since it's worth more (which explains why most of the fancier configs are always near the bottom). Fun fact: you can even write non-number values for most of these stats. E.g. if your config doesn't have an engine, you can write "none" for "Power", "Torque", "PowerPeakRPM", and "TorquePeakRPM"! You can also make a different in-game name for your config, in the quotation marks for "Configuration". For example, even though the 200BX config I used in this example is named "junkyard_drifter", I can make it show up in the vehicle selector as "The Missile", by putting that name in that slot: Save your info file, and close Notepad (or Notepad++). Launch BeamNG, and your config should show up with your description and performance stats! (the "Power" and "Torque" values can be quite off and unfortunately I have no idea what causes this, sorry...) Well done, you have reached the end of this guide/tutorial! I really hope that this helped you with making your configuration. If you have any questions or ran into a bottleneck, feel free to reply in this thread! Otherwise, thank you for reading, and have a nice day.
info.json stats can be generated on top of an existing file automatically: https://beamng.com/threads/performance-statistics-feedback-thread.28306/
Holy cow, that's so cool! I might give it a whirl myself. @DaddelZeit does this program work with configurations with mod parts? Because to be perfectly honest, most of my configs aren't exactly pure vanilla......
Oh, forgot to mention something. I would recommend keeping a backup of your custom configs (the ‘vehicles’ folder), especially if most of your configs have a custom info file. Why? Well, I learnt this the hard way. Cleaning cache or deep cleaning cache will remove the info files for your configurations. I ended up having to redo most of the info files and believe me when I say that it’s not the most enjoyable thing to do. So yeah, just keep that in mind. Also, some of the cars like the Bruckell Legran might have a bug with the car colour, where the colour you selected for it won’t show up the next time you load up your config. Basically, if you saved your custom, say, Legran as a custom config, there’s a chance that the next time you spawn it, it will spawn in that light brown metallic colour that’s on the default Legran thumbnail in the vehicle selector. I have no idea what causes this bug but it exists. If you saved your config in a vanilla colour from the colour palette, then you’re in luck, because then you can work around this manually. Basically, hover your cursor over the desired colour, and try to remember the exact name of that colour. For example, “Autumn Yellow” as a tertiary colour (aka roll cage colour) for the Legran. Next, open your info file, and type the orange line exactly as it is: { …… “defaultPaintName3”:“Autumn Yellow”, } (that’s an end bracket there on the bottom) After you save the info file, it should fix this issue. You can also do this with primary or secondary colours, just change the 3 to 1 or 2. Hope this helps!
Hey this is an awesome guide but when I copy my info file from my vehicles folder it doesn’t let me paste it into my user vehicles folder and therefore I can’t even do this correctly ?! --- Post updated --- Nvm it finally let me
Thanks so much this actually helped me out a lot now I have my own configs and they look like factory dev versions !
I think I might have the solution for this. The numbers you input into the info file were 236tq / 260hp, but the output was 174tq / 256hp. This can't be due to drivetrain losses since those would be fairly even for both tq/hp (and I don't think beamng accounts for this). So it must be due to a unit conversion. We're used to dealing with foot-pound (ft-lb) and horsepower (hp) as the standard imperial units for tq and hp, but since beamng is known to use metric units internally, therefore the game tries to convert the already correct numbers into what it thinks will be correct. The metric unit for tq is Nm (Newton-meter), which has a conversion rate of 1.355 Nm/ft-lb And the metric unit for hp is PS (PferdStarke), which has a conversion rate of 1.014 PS/hp (Actual conversion values are more precise but these values should round correctly) So in this case with the actual imperial tq/hp of 236tq and 260hp, you multiply your actual values by these conversion rates to get what you should put in the info file. 236 ft-lb * 1.355 Nm/ft-lb = 320 Nm 260 hp * 1.014 PS/hp = 264 PS You would actually want to input 320tq and 264hp in the info file, to get the output display of 236tq and 260hp. Let me know if you have any questions, hope this helps!
UPDATE: As of 0.28, the game automatically disables dynamic reflections upon spawn in Showroom, so you don't have to do it yourself every time you use this map
