Crash Time III: Porting Crash Time maps between CT2 and CT3

First of all, thank you for still playing these god forsaken games in (as of this moment) 2024.

As the title says, I’ll teach you how to swap maps from one game to another. It is a pretty straightforward process that takes less than 2 minutes if you have a decent hard drive.

First of all, you are going to make a backup copy of your “Scenarios” folder of both games (CT2 and CT3). This folder is located in the game’s root folder.

You NEED to do this backup if you want to be able to revert these changes. You’ll likely want to do so, since swapping maps will disable any progress, missions, traffic and pretty much any position-related behavior.

Now you are going to effectively replace the involved files.
But first I’ll explain some things I found curious about the way these games work (particularly CT3).

Each game has two maps, one for the autobahn and one for the city. The city map is called Stadt and the autobahn map is called Autobahn. Now, Crash Time 3 actually has a total of “four” maps, because each one has a night and a day version, the night ones containing lighting-related information and a different version of light posts, signs and buildings, because they need to have working lights and stuff. These versions are called V1 (for the day version) and V2 (for the night version), therefore in Crash Time 2 you will only find the V1 folder inside each map folder.

So, just to clarify, replacing the files within a V1 folder will only modify the day version of that map, and the same applies for the V2 folder, which will only replace the night version.

You can’t just replace the whole Scenarios folder and expect the game to work just like that, you need to pick ONLY the files and folders I have selected in the screenshot and copy them into the Scenarios folder of the other game.
It will ask you to replace something like 650 files, just accept and wait for the operation to finish.

Doing that process should work instantly for CT2 (I mean, porting CT3’s map to CT2). But if you made the port the other way around and forgot to carefully read what I mentioned above, you might encounter some problems.

After copying those files, launching the game (CT3) and picking a map, you might encounter an error that says “Loading operation went wrong” or something like that. This means that you haven’t selected the files I told you to select and probably replaced something you shouldn’t. In that case, use your backup and copy the correct files. This is the ONLY reason for that to happen.

This means you’re not loading the correct map. Replacing the day version of a map and then loading the night version will do nothing, you need to make sure that you’ve selected the one you actually replaced, both map and version. To switch between versions you just need to choose an hour between 10AM and 15 or 16PM (for the day version) in the briefing menu. Any other time outside of those hours will count as night, therefore loading the night version.

Now I’ll detail some problems that are not your fault (afaik).

There will be no grass (duh).

Correction, there’s no VISIBLE traffic. The usual traffic is driving underneath the map, well, they are actually spawning and falling into a botomless void.

Pressing R to “respawn” will no longer work, you will be teleported underneath the ground and fall forever. This happens because the new map is some meters above the original one, so since you are being respawned in terms of the original map coordinates, you will always clip into the ground.
Keep in mind that falling into the void will increase your speed pretty rapidly, and achieving a really high speed (somewhat like 10K Km/h) will crash the time, I mean the game.

Of course they are, they were hard-placed in the original map. You’ll find repair spots and zone switchers pretty much anywhere on the replaced map.

Because the developers were either too lazy or too poor to design a new engine and file structure, so they only changed the shaders and textures.