Maximize Your Upgrades/ Unlock Characters

How to edit the condition rating, and/or tier level, of your vehicle upgrades.

Introduction

As I understand it, once you have completed all of the races in tournament mode, the condition of the vehicle upgrades for that profile are now "fixed", and can no longer be adjusted. I wanted to experience the vehicle at peak performance, so I had a look into the files, and came up with a method of maxing out the upgrades' condition.

Preparation

In order to do the editing, you will need some sort hex editor, or at the very least, a good text editor such as Notepad ++. Now, here is the "catch", conflict of data between an edited player profile (.sav file), and the save data from the last loaded profile in (tgfd.dat), must be prevented.

If the profile (last) loaded into the .dat file, happens to be the same profile as the one that you have edited, your edits will be overwritten upon loading of the game. There are multiple methods of preventing this from happening, but I believe I've chosen the most convenient.

Before we begin though, I would recommend that the Steam Cloud, for Episode 1 Racer be disabled.

• Right-click on Star Wars Episode 1 Racer, in the Steam Library.
  
• Choose "Properties".
  
• Select the "Updates" tab.
  
• Click on "Enable Steam Cloud synchronization" (if the box is "checked"), to remove the check-mark from the option box.
  
• Close the menu.

Next:

• Navigate the game folder path to: Star Wars Episode I Racer\data\player.
  
• Create a new folder, inside of the "player" folder.
  
• Drag the tgfd.dat file into the new folder (you will likely not need it again).
  
• Drag any profiles that you don't wish to edit, into the new folder as well.
  
• Make a copy of the profile that you intend to edit, and paste it into the new folder as a backup.

Editing Upgrade Condition

Now to begin, open the target .sav file with your editing program; you should see something similar to this:



In the above image, you'll notice the offsets highlighted in blue. These have been edited to "maximum", or in decimal- 255, in hexidecimal- FF. These are the seven offsets that represent the condition of the vehicle upgrades; they can be adjusted (i'm assuming anything between the hex equivalent of decimal 255 and 0). Edit them as they appear in the image, to set them to 100%.

After you are finished making changes, be certain to save the file.

Upgrade Tier and Pit Droids

I've been able to determine what some of the other offsets govern:

I'm not certain whether having more than four pit droids actually improves repair in general.

Using 5 or 6 droids will likely cause the pod racer to vanish, while in the Inspect Vehicle, and Vehicle Ugrades modes. Often, exiting these menus will crash the game, as well as the Buy Pit Droids menu.

Using a Text Editor

If you want to try using a text editor, instead of the hex editor... (I could not succeed with Notepad or Wordpad, as they are known to corrupt sensitive files, [you will get an "Error Loading File" message in the menu]). ...the image below shows the last few characters of the same .sav file in Notepad ++. The characters highlighted in red represent the offsets that govern the condition of the seven upgrades, in order from 1-7, at 100%. You may have to copy the character " ÿ " from somewhere else in the file, or this guide, in order to paste it in to edit the file.



After you are finished making changes, don't forget to save the file.

Testing

Now you're ready launch the game, and in tournament mode, select the edited profile and choose a race course. Open the vehicle upgrades menu to see whether your efforts were successful.

---------------------
IMPORTANT:
---------------------
Every time that the game is launched, an new tgfd.dat file will be created in the player folder. Henceforth, when making any additional edits, you will want this file to be deleted. As, if the file is present at launch, it will overwrite your new edits as explained in the Preparation section above.


If you damage the file, restore the copy in the backup folder.

If you are going to post "doesn't work", please mention with which program.

"Good Luck" - R.I.P

Bonus section: Unlocking Characters

Someone in the comments section had asked about unlocking the characters for use earlier in the game, so I did some testing and located the relevant values. If you look at the sample save file images above, you should be able see at address 0x30, columns 8,9, and a, the entries:

ff ff 7f

Adding these to a save file should unlock the 23 main racer characters. Note, I did not do any extensive testing beyond checking for crashes in the other areas and running the first race with the track favorite.

[Qui-Gonzalo]

I'd always just stick to the second-highest tier parts for the final race, and then I could buy the upgrades after. Inferno is easy-peasy compared to The Abyss and The Gauntlet, anyways.

[R.I.P]

@ Serval
I added a section about unlocking the characters to the guide.

[A Fat, Angry Serval]

I've been doing "single character only" challenge runs recently but I've completed runs for Bullseye and the starting six and am now looking at having to edit the save after I do one for Toy Dampner. Is there any way to mark a specific character as unlocked?

[Weszles]

How to hex edit in notepad ++ x64:
1) install notepad++ x64
2) open and navigate to "plugins > Plugins admin" then search "hex" in the plugins admin dialogue
3) install the "Hex-editor"
4) on restart of notepad ++ after the install go to "plugins > hex-editor" and check "view in hex"

[pikasmiles]

Using this photo for reference. In layman terms, the Pit Droid modifier is on the 6th line down in column 4.

Also..

On the 5th line in column C, D, and E, where it reads "10 a9 00." These are the money modifiers. Changing these to "ff ff ff" will change your money amount to $16,777,215.

[Musket]

okay

[R.I.P]

@Eric

Always create back-up files first, and don't start by editing everything at once. Just make one edit at-a-time, then test, until you have become familiar with the process.

[Musket]

my brain not that big to do all of this

[allendalewilliams]

Brilliant!!

[_Ian_Feel_Keepin_It_Real_]

Further to my previous comment. The Truguts data is actually a 4 byte signed value, so you can give yourself even more money by setting the next byte too. Be aware, because it's signed if you set a value greater than 0x7F the value becomes negative.
eg.
0xFF 0xFF 0xFF 0x7F = 2,147,483,583
0xFF 0xFF 0xFF 0x80 = -2,147,483,583