GenString Limitation and it's solution

Here's a post from Vince Klortho in RSC forum:

My team ran into a problem the other day. We were using the GenString method to select tires and you can have roughly 40 different options for one character. Unfortunately, we ran out of possibilities because one particular car has more than 40 types of wheels/tires combinations and we were already using the other seven characters of the GenString for other things. We used one digit for front wheels and one for rear wheels out of the nine available. Our decision was to bag the GenString all together and use upgrade files to specify all variable meshes used by a car. Now we can be fully descriptive with mesh file names like : xyxWheeels_DunlopGoldBBSwires_LFA.gmt instead of a single character specifier for each type like xyxWheeels_1_LFA.gmt. We are very glad to have taken this step because now everything is much more flexible. It takes a little getting used to and some time to set things up but when you have dozens of variants of a single car to deal with it can really make life simpler. It does mean an additional file for every car but you can use a spreadsheet to generate those if you want to and then you have just one file to maintain. In fact, one spreadsheet can be used to generate the upgrades and .VEH files for every car and then it is very quick and easy to make "global" changes when necessary.

Another little thing : you do not have to use separate GEN files for the spinner and the game if you don't want to. There are <SPIN> and <NOSPIN> options available (for spinner-only and non-spinner meshes respectively) so one GEN file can take care of both which means there is one fewer file to write and maintain this way.

So if you're having similar problem, Vince's team solution probably can solve your problem.