Vehicle Data

The Burnout Vehicle file format is used to store data for a particular vehicle in all Burnout games from Takedown to Dominator. It uses the file extension  for player vehicles, and   for traffic vehicles. It is the successor to Point of Impact's Burnout 2 Race Car file format.

This format contains most of the data related to any given vehicle, including mesh data, Level of Detail models, texture data, pointers to external files, deformation matrices, collision detection parameters and physics configuration info.

= Versions =


 * Version 0x1D and onward store deformation matrices in a different order to previous revisions.
 * The LOD Database version present in revision 0x14 BGVs are the only version to use global pointers for their Vehicle Object tables. These point to the exact location in the file of each object, whereas local pointers, used in all subsequent versions of the format, use offsets relative to the beginning of the LOD. For example, a pointer to offset 0x1820 in a 0x14-era LOD Database would appear to point to 0x140 in all other versions.

= Layout (Version 0x17) =

LOD Database
The LOD Database format stores a given vehicle's LOD model.

LODs, or Levels of Detail, are lower-poly, lower-detail (hence the name) models that games use for objects that are far away from the player, to keep framerates smooth. BGVs contain 4 LOD Databases, which in turn each contain one LOD model of minimum (LOD 3), low (LOD 2), medium (LOD 1) and high (LOD 0) quality.

It seems a LOD Database can contain a maximum of 12 vehicle objects, though it's unknown if this rule is enforced by the game or if it can be larger than that.

Vehicle Mesh
The format for a Vehicle Mesh definition differs by platform.

Engine Sound Model
This format contains playback parameters and pitching info for a given vehicle's engine sound effects, stored mostly as floating-point numbers. BGVs use two of these files for high and low speed ranges. The files were merged into the BGV starting with revision 0x17; prior to this, they were stored externally in the same folder as the BGV, with the file extensions  and.