Introduction

This guide contains useful information that will help you make a career mod in Assetto Corsa. All this knowledge has been gathered by the Carriera Plus Team throughout development. The purpose of this is to render ACCP as open and expandable as possible, following the Assetto Corsa philosophy.

The guide won't cover (at least for now) topics that are related to cars/track issues (fuel consumptions, AI trajectories...) that are nonetheless useful to make your custom career top-notch. This is because not enough research has been made in order to provide accurate and useful information.

Why career modding?

The most obvious reason is of course progression. You can make serieses unlockable only if a previous championship is won, for example. This progress gets saved in the game itself. The true potential of career modding, though, is low-level development. You can avoid coding almost completely, but if you choose to do otherwise you can exploit the syntax to create new behaviours for the game. A great example is the ability to change car mid-championship: let's say you are creating a championship in which teams upgrade their cars throughout the season (i.e. stock, s1, s2...). This can be implemented by hardcoding a different car in the right .ini files, and it's something no custom championship or CM preset can achieve this easily. We will thoroughly explore syntax exploitation in the appropriate section.

General advice before starting

As previously stated, you will need to code a little. This means working in an enviroment that was not meant for the end user to fiddle around with. Following some simple rules will save you a lot of time. PLEASE NOTE that the following rules are a result of a trial-and-error process and your desired workflow may be different.

Planning, implementation and testing

This may as well apply to every aspect of life: you need to have a general idea of what kind of mod you want to make. ACCP itself is loosely planned, but some planning is necessary. Even launching a normal AC race that recreates your idea can catch serious issues early on. There's no real need to participate in the event: just let the AI run and see if some problems occour.

Let's use an example: you want to make a quick race at Imola with the Tatuus FA01, with 100% AI and aggression. I'm using Kunos content in this example to point out that problems occour even with vanilla content. If you try this, you will find out that the cars will go wide exiting from the Villeneuve chicane if they try to overtake. There is a way to fix this by simply lowering aggression, but the lesson here is that you catched an issue and you are able to adjust it without the need to actually play!

When you are satisfied with your race, use Quick Drive Presets in Content Manager to save your race settings and load them in the future. This also saves a lot of time.

Once all of that is out of the way, you can create your career mod quite easily. As a general advice, work on the UI component last. What if you spend 10hours making the perfect image for a certain event, and then you decide to scrap said event because it wasn't particularly fun?

Focus on testing the core content. This is the most time-consuming phase, but it will make sure your mod works and you actually want to play with it. Also keep in mind that there is no chance you will find all the problems on your own. You may want to share your content with others.

Getting some quality content

I recommend Girellu's wiki in order to discern good mods from bad mods at a glance. It doesn't keep track of everything of course, and as a matter of fact Carriera Plus uses some content from the "naughty list" for various reasons. It is nonetheless a good reference to understand why you shouldn't use that shady, encrypted car with funny physics.

This spreadsheet contains a list of basically every Assetto Corsa track known to man. So if you are trying to recreate that 1965 niche race nobody knows about, you may find your luck there. Maybe cross-reference what you find there with Girellu's wiki. Please.

Making your first career mod

This section aims to get a career event done real quick to familiarize with some of the peculiarities of the process. In fact, the quickest method available is to exploit the game itself and make it do the boring work.

Step 1 - Skeleton

This is simple: you can download the base career template here. Next up, put it in this directory:

\assettocorsa\content\career\

Inside, you will find a event1 folder and a series.ini file. Open the latter and fill it up following the commented instructions. For this guide, I will create a single event series that can be beaten with a gold medal:

P.S. Notepad++ is highly recommended.

Step 2 - Exploiting Content Manager

You may know that Assetto Corsa is divided into two different programs: the launcher and the actual game. The job of the launcher is to set up the .ini files that the game will read to set up your race configuration as well as graphics, controls et cetera. Content Manager does the same work and then boots the game, and in this section we will scoop the race.ini file that will be kindly compiled by CM. After you follow the instructions in the picture, CM will create a race.ini file into this directory:

This PC\Documents\Assetto Corsa\cfg

Open the file, then go back to

\assettocorsa\content\career\event1

and open event.ini.

I made some comments to event.ini hoping you can understand best what every instruction means and how to fill it. Other than that, for this guide you only need these notions:

• Every [TAG] type that is present both in race.ini and event.ini must be copied to event.ini. For example, the [RACE] tag is present on both files so you can copy the content from race.ini onto event.ini
• Depending on your type of event, race.ini may have more than one [SESSION_X] tag. Copy each one of them to event.ini
• If you set up some opponents for your event, you will need to copy every [CAR_X] tag to the event file. For some reason (probably parallelization) CM doesn't put them in order, but you can dump them at the end of the file to keep your .ini nice and tidy. Please note that this is not the only way to do this. In fact we will see other ways to set up opponents, but this is the most immediate method and it will work for every situation.

Step 3 - Testing it out

You need to rename the BASE TEMPLATE folder to make it recognizable by the launcher/CM. This could have been done earlier, but since not all files were properly filled in, some error messages would show up and get you scared. Plus, editing .ini files while CM is open may lead to crashes. This is something we will get more in depth in other sections.

The naming convention is quite straightforward: you need to put the prefix

series

onto your folder name. Other than that, everything is permitted (within folder naming limitations). You may want to come up with your own naming convention to get a specific order. For example, ACCP series are named seriesx_1** so that ACCP events appear on the right side of the vanilla career events.

For this example, we will rename the folder

seriesy_BASE TEMPLATE

After you renamed the folder, it should appear on the CM Career window:

Note that we did not put any preview pictures, so this square will stay blank. We will enhance this series in the next section.

You have now made a working career mod! You can test it out to check if everything is to your liking. In the next section, we will go more in-depth and understand better how to make a proper career mod.