Released American 80's Fullsize Series 2.1

Yeah please send those, I'm starting with the bodies now.
Also a few questions:

• What is the difference between the front bumpers of Delta 88, Custom Cruiser and Regency? They seem identical, with the same geometry, UVs, materials and Jbeams, but are separate models anyway.
• Is there any difference between the sedan and wagon nosecones other than the materials which only affect the skins? If there is none then that's a pretty big waste of file size.
• Similarly the "hiddenrust" parts only seem to differ in terms of having different materials. If they use a glow map anyway, then what is the point of having that material on a separate model, if the base material can be modified from the glowmap?
• Do you have an updated version of the vanilla wheel skins somewhere? There are so many materials, I don't want to update every single one to PBR myself.

 

I am making sure there are as little duplicates in this mod as reasonable, in order to make maintenance easier. Will most likely have to either redo the skin UVs or make other drastic changes to the skin system. And yeah send me the textures and materials.

 

I managed to get a lot done myself in the past few days so I'll show another progress update now. But don't get used to the progress being so fast, this is due to me temporarily having too much free time lol.
I focused mostly on the Delta 88 for now, got the body back in game with some fixed shading issues (except for the ones on the firewall, the firewall is a mess, it also has stretched textures and missing faces in a few spots, I won't be attempting it myself but maybe someone else will). The other cars are still just frames and there are no other Delta 88 bodies for now because I haven't fixed the shading and Jbeam on those yet.

The issues were most noticable on the door hinges and detents, which look a lot better after my quick fix. (As far as I can tell this issue was specific to the Delta 88, the other cars in the mod had better hinges.)

The body had several issues which made it stuck to the frame on hard crashes when it should normally detach. (Missing break groups on body and inner fenders, trunk bottom being too low and clipping with fuel tank, part of the rear body clipping with frame, engine having some near unbreakable beams attaching to the firewall that are normally supposed to trigger visual damage, etc.) Another issue was that the triangles were a mess, some were flipped on the wrong side, duplicated, missing or asymmetrical. I fixed those issues, probably won't touch other less critical ones like the non-uniform node distribution on the roof. I also got rid of even more annoying duplicates where possible (for example there were 9 different versions of the inner fenders scattered around the vehicle files, and only 4 of them were different in any way, as there were 2 different models and a normal and rusty Jbeam version for each. So now there are only 4 versions, all in common folder, it makes parts selector slightly confusing but whatever, it's easier to work with).
I'm focusing on the Delta 88 but the other Oldsmobile also has something revamped, namely the front fascia. I made both fascias available on both cars, since a similar option was a thing originally, and I did it via common folder to get rid of duplicates. I made it modular in parts selector too so you can mix parts between them because realistically there would be no restrictions for it. I fixed the misaligned lights glow and the weird shading on some of the fascias too. Also in theory the fascias being in common means that are now usable on the Chevy too, not sure if I will keep that or if I'll make a separate radiator support for it that will only allow the Chevy ones, depends they it will look decent combined with the Chevy body panels.

I made all bumpers available on all cars too, it will be useful for derby configs as derby cars hardly ever have original bumpers. And instead of having many slightly different bumpers, I made them modular too. You can exactly recreate any previous bumper from these parts, like I did before with the engines. I also added the derby front bumper from LeGran and wheelie bar from Moonhawk, both use common vanilla textures so it shouldn't increase the mod's file size too much. Also I improved the Jbeams of the offroad bumpers and bumper lights because they kinda sucked, no offense to AR162b who made them.

I revamped the custom license plates too. Instead of having a dozen duplicates of a license plate model, they now work like the vanilla license plate designs. And to get rid of many similar duplicates with slightly different text, most of them support custom text now. They support normal maps for the text so there is no disadvantage of the text looking worse than before, only the fonts are different, but I picked the most similar ones to the old fonts that are available for license plates. The random license plate text generator will generate text that resembles the old text options on them. And kind of a side effect of using the license plate design slot is that you can use them on vanilla cars too.

 

Good news: Openable hood. Bad news: I had to redo 90% of the hood Jbeam to make it openable (redoing the latch, increasing node weight for stability, adding extra nodes for the latch and hinge axis points, changing positions of 1/3 of all nodes, changing most spring and damp values, adding extra rigids, changing weight and position of rigidifier nodes and all the beams that connect to them, adding many new beams for the hinges and latch, hood catch, gas struts, pop open beams, adding some beams to simulate those limiter springs on the hood irl, adding a lot more support beams because the hinge axis was changed so it needed something to prevent clipping with the body and to prevent axis point inversion...) So there is no way I could prevent changing the damage model on the hood. It will crash differently now, similarly to how vanilla cars crash differently after receiving their openable stuff.

Better news: visible derby hood plates, they were previously only visible on the Caprice and now they are on the Oldsmobiles too, taken from the LeGran and use common textures like the derby bumper I added earlier.

 

It's not a remaster, we are not redoing the whole thing, only fixing the biggest issues and bringing it up to date. It's a refresh, like the devs did with the ETKs. A full remaster of this mod would take like 5 years minimum due to the amount of stuff it has.