herbfargus/viper-racing-mods

Viper Racing community mods

Twenty-odd years of community-made cars and tracks for Viper Racing (MGI / Sierra, 1998), preserved as their authors distributed them.

Each file here is an original distribution archive — the same zip someone uploaded to a fan site, with its readme, its screenshots and whatever else the author put in it. Nothing has been repacked, renamed, or tidied. That is the point: the archive is the record, and once it is edited it stops being one.

Browse them with thumbnails, spec sheets and attribution at the Viper Racing Community Gallery.

Layout

cars/frankscars/      155 packs     78 MB
cars/otherscars/        1 pack       1 MB
cars/valscars/      1,511 packs  2,264 MB
cars/vrgt/             82 packs    312 MB
tracks/herbstracks/     3 packs      7 MB
tracks/otherstracks/   54 packs    210 MB
tracks/retextured/     42 packs     94 MB
tracks/valstracks/    160 packs    458 MB
tracks/vrgt/           15 packs     41 MB

2,023 packs, 3.38 GB. The folders are the collections the community itself filed these under, mostly by author. vrgt appears under both cars/ and tracks/ and holds different mods in each, which is why the tree prefix is part of the path.

A pack usually contains one .car or one .tra/.trk, but not always — some hold several, and a few ship a car alongside the track it was made for.

Getting files

A single pack, by URL:

https://huggingface.co/datasets/herbfargus/viper-racing-mods/resolve/main/cars/frankscars/250gto.zip

These URLs send CORS headers, so a browser page can fetch() them directly — which is how the gallery renders a car in 3D without anyone installing anything.

A collection, or the lot:

from huggingface_hub import snapshot_download

snapshot_download("herbfargus/viper-racing-mods", repo_type="dataset",
                  allow_patterns="cars/frankscars/*")

There is also a volume-split copy on GitHub for grabbing the whole corpus in ten files instead of two thousand requests.

What is in a pack, and where the metadata lives

Nothing here is annotated — the files are untouched. Everything derived from them lives in the gallery's manifest.json: name, spec sheet, part counts, vertex counts, a rendered thumbnail, the author where a readme names one, the game a model was converted from, and the pack's sha256. It joins back to this dataset on the pack path.

The reading is done by vrmod, a pure-Python toolkit for Viper Racing's formats. If you want to open a .car yourself, start there.

Attribution, and what this is not

These mods were made by many people over about two decades, and a great number of the cars are conversions of models from other games, credited in the readme inside each pack to their original authors.

This dataset preserves and redistributes those archives. It is not a claim of authorship over any of them, and it is not a license grant: each pack carries whatever terms its author gave it, which is why the license field above says "other" rather than naming one. If you are the author of something here and would rather it were not, please open a discussion on this dataset — it will be removed.

Where a readme names a person, the gallery credits them. About a third of the assets are files that several packs ship in common — usually a stock game file riding along inside a retexture — and those are deliberately left unattributed rather than guessed at.

Integrity

Every pack's sha256 was recorded before upload and verified after. A pack downloaded from here hashes identically to the archive that was indexed. The hashes are in the gallery manifest as source_sha256.