Who can forget the first time they played GTA London and saw the same car as they were driving appearing onscreen in a different paintscheme? Going to get your car resprayed held a whole new appeal, and when the Special Remap cheat was announced I'm sure many of us sat and played to see what had been created. Opening the Style file in GTA Cars didn't help any, as the individual sprites were unaccessable - we could get a better look at all the paintschemes but we couldn't get into them properly to find out how it was done.
Well, I don't know who worked it out first, but I got the scoop from the SACI and immediately suffered a Homer moment - of course, this made perfect sense! Why hadn't anyone thought of it sooner, etc..... Valdez had even gone to the trouble of creating a small tutorial on how to add hacks, but as he himself admits he's no artist and so the scope of what was possible wasn't truly revealed.
Not much was made of this new hacking technology. Even cars released into the scene by Ray Larabie failed to take any advantage of it. After about 2 or 3 months after the hacking was first discovered I believe only 3 cars had attempted to use it: Phat Rat's Ford Mustang Cobra, which didn't have any hacked detailing, but simply changed from red to blue to silver; GTA Thug's Verrazdo SUV which seemed to copy Valdez's tutorial to the letter - including only using 4 palette entries for the stripe; and a red blob called a car by it's author that had 2 pure white stripes appear on it's roof and was ignored by the majority of the scene.
Then this new pretender to the scene came along one day and released a conversion of one of another artist's cars, having taken 2 original versions and splicing them together. That upstart's name was JH4C. Reviews of the new work were very favorable, so he kept on hacking cars. In the ensuing months new techniques have been developed, most of which are closely guarded as they have reduced the worktime for all but the most complex hacks from hours to minutes - indeed, LingSter's 1999 Corvette was hacked "while-u-wait" style during an ICQ chat! While I can't promise this kind of speed for your first hacks, pretty soon you'll find the thing that takes longest is deciding how you want it to look.
Warning:- These tutorials include graphic illustrations of the ongoing process, and so will take a while to fully download. Some of the graphics are very large, and so you should set your screen resolution to at least 800x600 if you can.
Palette Hacking with Paint Shop Pro 5.0.
Palette Hacking with Photoshop 4.01.
Advanced Hacking - Palette Editing with PSP and Photoshop; Pixel-perfect presentation.
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Please Note:- I put a lot of work into these tutorials, and a lot more groundwork into learning just how to hack quickly and effectively - Don't Steal These Tutorials!
If you would like a copy for your site mail me and ask!
This also applies to the people who want to hack cars - please, respect the original authors and ask their permission. Don't go hacking cars and claiming them as totally your own work, and please, please don't let's have hundreds of different hacks of the same few cars!