Game mods and V8 Hacks with Style
My first attempt at a ‘city’, but really in this case it’s purely for testing my own vehicles I happen to port into Midtown Madness 2.
This locale features various modules that test a vehicle’s parameters, to assist in tuning.
You can grab it from the usual button below in the new “Locales” option.
Custom Roadster has now been ported to Midtown Madness 2.
Oddly, Custom Roadster is one of the broken meshes of Burnout 2, many vertices are loose and hidden behind other faces. To overcome this, I’ve had to merge most vertices or create vertices to merge to.
Midtown Madness 2 is sometimes picky on the order of the faces to appear correctly and avoid being culled.
History shows I like to keep meshes as original as possible; however, this wasn’t able to be done as a direct port.
As usual, grab it from the button below.
Cop Car has now been ported to Midtown Madness 2.
This time, mesh was ported with my own python scripts to import from a render trace. Therefore, I was able to grab the Developer’s Cut mesh and textures from XEMU.
Second stage of the python script then imports into Blender and applies automatic cleanup methods, and some other house keeping things to restore the mesh in its original condition and production quality.
Due to limitations of MM2 and not showing faces for _L objects behind alpha channels, I’ve had to remove the “Lens” over the lights to keep the original effects from Burnout 2. Other than that, the mesh is original!
As usual, grab it from the button below.
Custom Coupe has now been ported to Midtown Madness 2.
One of the most recognisable cars from the Burnout Series and managed to make its way all towards Burnout Paradise!
Such an awesome car, design-wise with its very unique livery.
Burnout 2 is a RenderWare 3.4 game, close to what GTA games used in the day as well. However, Burnout 2 has its own type of compression on its .rws archives, therefore it’s a bit of a challenge. I was able to do a little bit of reversing for it, however the geometry was just easier to pull out of memory than an unknown packed archive. In other words, I was little lazy with this one but put time into a solid port than tool development here.
TIGER-SPL 2 ALPHA has now been ported to Midtown Madness 2.
The TIGER-SPL 2 ALPHA is one of the fastest and most distinctive vehicles in Double-S.T.E.A.L: The Second Clash, presenting unique challenges during the porting process. A significant issue arose from the game’s use of shader-based textures that are dynamically coloured in-game. Consequently, when extracted and viewed in standard .DDS viewers, many textures—including the interior, tyre treads, lights, and grill—appeared white.
Contrary to initial assumptions, the textures were not compressed using complex or proprietary methods. Instead, Double-S.T.E.A.L: The Second Clash employs advanced shaders that were later commonplace in subsequent gaming consoles. Therefore, numerous manual adjustments were necessary to ensure these textures appeared accurately in Midtown Madness 2.
Replicating the original game’s distinctive colour-shifting paint posed additional difficulties, as it involves multiple shader layers and metallic effects—features entirely absent in Midtown Madness 2. Seeking inspiration from previous console generations, I revisited “HSV Adventure Racing,” an Australian adaptation of “Beetle Adventure Racing,” particularly the “HSV Alien” vehicle, which uses an environmental map to create an illusion of colour-shifting. This involved generating a custom environmental map with a liquified, swirl-gradient rainbow spectrum in Photoshop.
However, as Midtown Madness 2 lacks support for environment map shading or vehicle-specific shader adjustments, this approach required modification. Ultimately, I resolved this by unwrapping the car’s entire body and applying a carefully adjusted swirl gradient texture, creating a convincing static colour-shift illusion.
Further modifications were made to the mesh structure to accommodate Midtown Madness 2’s graphical processing constraints. Specifically, windows required reworking to address transparency culling issues affecting characters Mai and Madoka, including partially raising the passenger-side window to realistically position Mai’s hand.
Additionally, characters were manually positioned and posed within the interior, resulting in an especially satisfying depiction of Mai grasping the roof.
Overall, porting the TIGER-SPL 2 ALPHA was among the most technically challenging endeavours I have undertaken, necessitating creative solutions to overcome Midtown Madness 2’s limitations. Despite these complexities, the final result was highly rewarding.
As always, you grab it from the usual button below.
DRAGON-SPL has now been ported to Midtown Madness 2.
One of the quickest cars in Double-S.T.E.A.L, and also the lightest which loves to accelerate on uneven surfaces. However, this won’t happen in this port, mainly because it’s a different game engine and code entirely. :wesh:.
Mesh is completely original with no modifications made to work with MM2.
Grab it from the usual button below.
SPANKER has now been ported to Midtown Madness 2.
I’d love to hear from a developer on how this name was chosen for this vehicle from Ray Tracers, however therefore it shouldn’t be forgotten.
Decided to try out the 3D Screenshot project from scurest, and it’s amazingly easy to use.
The project confirmed my theory a long time ago, that the wheels are not exactly real. They have no back facing faces, instead the rim texture is not even union/joined to the mesh of the wheel. With that finding, I had to create the wheels from scratch.
Body of the car was also modified to allow 3D wheels to fit under the guards. Body had no wheel wells (very common for that generation of vehicle models, Gran Turismo 2 did the same).
Other than those modifications mentioned, the mesh is rather original.
If you’ve never played Ray Tracers, handling and vehicle performance isn’t meant to be realistic. So, it’s attempted to be matched to the original handling.
Grab it from the usual button below.
BIG-TRUCK has now been ported to Midtown Madness 2.
This truck has an internal codename of “BIG-FOOT” within the game’s code while I was looking into the archive of the vehicle. This isn’t exactly useful information for anything, unless you’re very interested in Double-S.T.E.A.L. 😀
Just like the FUNNY-BUG this port has full working suspension including SHOCK and ARM movements.
Grab it from the usual button below.
YAKUZA-CAR has now been ported to Midtown Madness 2.
One of the most iconic unlockable within Double-S.T.E.A.L, the vehicle you’re set to destroy, and the vehicles that are set to destroy you as well. Bunkasha Publishing believe you should be able to play as the enemy too!
Being an ambient vehicle of the game, details are somewhat lacking a little, like straight tires, detailed lights and flares, very not-round rims etc.
During the port, the mesh has been edited to fix where Bunaksha Publishing were a bit lazy to fix (small joke, talented team of course) 🙂 – Vertices were welded to prevent weird reflections, some materials were set to clip, details around the mufflers and inside are assigned to a material (they’re originally untextured or some other trickery used). Lastly, rear speaker system area had it’s UVs re-aligned to minimise stretching that it suffered from.
Other than that, mesh is rather original heh.
SUPER-CAR has now been ported to Midtown Madness 2.
With limited detail options, I had to think outside the box for a depth effect on the Jatos. Double-S.T.E.A.L uses it’s “fake” HDR (those are the developer’s words, not mine) and trails for the effect on the SUPER-CAR’s jet flares. They both use a completely white circle, which the game’s post processing creates the 45-degree angled X pattern on the flare.
Midtown Madness 2 doesn’t really have any post processing technology, before pixel shading really took off. So, DECAL object was used as it allows layered transparency.
Just like the previous FUNNY-BUG port, the SUPER-CAR features ARM and AXEL objects for suspension.
