I have found a forgotten update of my Lemon Adieu which I started more than a year ago and then forgot about it, because there were some more interesting cars to do. The original idea was to provide a better model with various historic bodyworks (the original mod was one of my learning projects and the 3D model is quite poor), but that is too much work for such a slow mod so I ditched it.

However, it would be a shame to ditch everything, because a lot of work have been done already. Therefore I decided to publish a cabrio with a completely reworked interior as a standalone mod, based on a famous adventure movie.

Progress: a complete 3D model with reworked interior and wheels. Mappings are currently taken from the original mod and must be optimized. The mod will need a couple of new textures and small physics tweaking, otherwise it is basically done.

Progress: texturing. Added translucent dirt and 3D cracked window effects.

You like dirt, every mod you have has dirt or dust in it

He's like me

Lovely texturing work!

Quote from NENE87 :

You like dirt, every mod you have has dirt or dust in it

If a car is clean, it is just not driven enough. Well, still cleaner than my IRL car

(image source: citroenvie.com)

Quote from Flame CZE :

He's like me

I am not going to lie, the glass "decorations" are inspired by Hadraplan

Quote from Bokujishin :

Lovely texturing work!

Thanks, everything is painted by hand (including ambient occlusion) with a help of some basic GIMP patterns

Progress: recalculated gear ratios and tire sizes according to a detailed French documentation, which I found during work on Lemon Rose (with a little help from a google translate ). Tweaked axles a little according to some tech drawings, created an animation and fixed skins. This is my personal record, the mod is done in 3 days (if we do not count weeks of unpublished work and research, which I have accidentally found on my hard drive, during work on a Lemon Ara update ).

The car is released for public testing. Do not forget to drive it like you stole it and beware of combatant aircraft and potholes. Wipers are movable using "light extra" commands.

Update: I had a bad feeling about front axle camber changes and crosschecked my sources with photos of dismantled cars. It looks like the front suspension worked IRL slightly different than I expected. A weighted axle had positive camber while lifted had negative. This is fixed now. Also, I have found a video, where classics are harassed by professional stuntmen and tuned damping forces to approximate the right frequency better.

Update: Added indicators for cruise servers (back in the day some basic roadsters did not have indicators and drivers had to indicate with hands, which is currently impossible in the LFS ) and setups with various final drive ratios. The "Factory" setup has a default ratio, while the others were equipped at request. Reworked approximation of historic wheels.

The IRL car had 400mm rims (15.75) which was common for French cars of the era and unfortunately it is not supported in the current LFS version. In contrast to other contemporary cars, modern 165/80 cross-ply tires were used (back in the day bias-ply tires were much more common). To preserve realistic radius of the tire, the top speed and legendary handling, I decided to use a 16 rim with a 165/77 tire. This also approximates stiffer sidewalls of the IRL tires. Handling of the mod improved over previous 155/80 and 165/82 approximations (the second one is based on a modern oldtimer tires).

Despite closely following the technical specification, the mod handling was quite dull, especially in comparison with Hanzmund V8 mod, which used technology from the same period. I have tried to debug handling issues of the mod and found out, that I made a mistake in my historic tire approximations.

When I was working on the Hanzmund mod, it was a difficult puzzle. Every detail had to be almost exact (including aerodynamics), because otherwise the rear-engined car with a swing-axle was undriveable. I had to recalculate tire pressure to approximate historic bias-ply tires using LFS radials. It was really difficult, but at the end I got a mod, which feels pretty realistic.

On the other hand, the FWD Lemon is a completely different story as it had a completely different layout and used modern radial tires, so I thought that pressure recalculations were not necessary. Therefore, I used directly pressure data defined in an owners manual. Sidewalls were softer than IRL but it was easy to handle, so I thought it is probably ok (unfortunately I never had a chance to drive such old car IRL). Lately I have seen a 70s French movie "Le Bon et les méchants" and I was amazed, what stuntmen were able to do with the car (for example a lift-off oversteer was almost impossible with the mod). Therefore, I decided use recalculated pressure (the same formula which I used for Hanzmund) in combination with some minor chassis tweaks and 160/80 tire size (found out that despite original tires were marked 165/80 the overall tire width was only 162). And voilá, now it drives like it should

So, after the update, you can finally drive it like you stole it, which is a historically proper way as these cars were number one choice for robbing a bank back in the day.