MTM2 Render Distance Patch

[Slayer]

Found another track it's not compatible with. Spring Valley.

The annoying thing is that it simply gives an AV and doesn't mention any specific errors for you to reverse engineer.
Maybe one day I'll have a lot of free time to look into this.

Is it at a specific spot in the track? Maybe you could modify the track to find the culprit.

[Fila]

It is a specific point in the track yep.

[Mat-Allum]

Debugging idea: Does the render distance patch hard-code a new distance or is it determined by monster.ini? Try turning one or both way down and running the track again. If it still crashes, you will still be most likely much closer to the problem object on the track, which ought to make it a lot easier to pinpoint what's crashing it.

[Disposable]

Hi Guys, been lurking for some time ... One minor problem I noticed running Deadmans Gulch with all trucks enabled, is the tyre marks left on the ground start appearing some way behind the trucks. So if you are following the pack, the tyre marks always seem to be trying to catch up with the trucks, they don't start under the wheels but some way behind?

[Fila]

Debugging idea: Does the render distance patch hard-code a new distance or is it determined by monster.ini? Try turning one or both way down and running the track again. If it still crashes, you will still be most likely much closer to the problem object on the track, which ought to make it a lot easier to pinpoint what's crashing it.

I'll look into that when I'll get a chance. Going through another busy period right now.

[Fila]

Hi Guys, been lurking for some time ... One minor problem I noticed running Deadmans Gulch with all trucks enabled, is the tyre marks left on the ground start appearing some way behind the trucks. So if you are following the pack, the tyre marks always seem to be trying to catch up with the trucks, they don't start under the wheels but some way behind?

Since I rarely play with AI trucks I never noticed. Funny bug though

[Slayer]

-Edit
Nevermind, I wasn't running the latest patch

[Fila]

Gave a few more test tries, including cloning the tracks and modifying them. The error seems to be due to too many models rendered at once. It's hard to know whether it's the number of vertices, or the number of actual objects as the game doesn't give a reason when it crashes. Just gives an AV with no details (hence it's hard to try and fix it because there are several ambiguous AV crashes with no comments related to different things).

Also, I drove from the other way of the track and every time the crashes simply happen in the exact same spot.

[Mat-Allum]

I suspect swapping out the models for simple cubes would answer that question.

[Fila]

I'll do that tomorrow.

[Nition]

I'd love to do this for MTM 1 as well, where the view distance is even more ridiculous. I grew up with MTM 1 but you can barely see the corners coming up in front of you.

I downloaded IDA and had a look around Moster.exe, and I managed to find some stuff about the view window width/height, and the GUI, but nothing about the render distance. I'm a newbie at disassembling like this though so I was really just searching blindly for things like "view", "distance", "frustum" etc.

Has anyone ever looked into it?

It looks to me like the default view distance is about 8 tiles in front of you - so 16 tiles total maybe?



I don't know if they did this in MTM 2, but in MTM 1 every map is the same standard size, so smaller circuits have a massive amount of unused space. Some of the tracks have cool bonus areas if you go exploring. It'd be extra nice to be able to see those areas before you're right on top of them! The Highlands map has a hidden castle that you can sit in the middle of and not even see the walls!

[Fila]

Don't think anyone looked into MTM1.

In the meantime we moved on from using IDA to poke around monster.exe and we're using the source code of MTM2 to make changes, which makes it alot easier.

And yes, the maps have a standard size for MTM2 as well. Actually MTM1 tracks are compatible with MTM2.

[Slayer]

I don't really see much point in upgrading MTM1 unless you really want official drag racing, and view distance doesn't really help with that.
Just load the MTM1 tracks into MTM2 and call it a day.

[Nition]

I didn't even realise you could play MTM 1 tracks in MTM 2 as I've only ever owned the first one. I'm totally going to go find a copy now, thanks!

Edit: OK so I dug up a copy of MTM2, copied the pods over, installed the community patch. What a difference!



On Yucatan Adventure you can see the whole volcano island from the main island. How cool is that!

[Fila]

The only thing MTM2 doesn't do is the drags. I hope to eventually implement that in MTM2 but it will take a while as I haven't had time to look over the gamecode since early December.

[Cale]

One thing I would like to eventually do to the MTM 1 tracks is upgrade them with at least seamless textures and maybe full-on texture upgrades. It's a big project, though.

[Nition]

Honestly I almost never played the drag races anyway. They were the most boring part of the game.

I thought it was interesting that MTM2 uses sprites for some things where MTM1 used full 3D. Compare the trees in A Crazy 8 to the trees in Crazy 98 for instance.

[Cale]

^Stylistic difference. I always liked MTM1's chunky, colorful look better than MTM2. The sprite trees in MTM2 give a more realistic look to fit in with the scenery, without adding tons of vertices to the scene.

[Slayer]

One thing I would like to eventually do to the MTM 1 tracks is upgrade them with at least seamless textures and maybe full-on texture upgrades. It's a big project, though.

Could probably cheat and just do the track and common short cuts.

[Cale]

Really, there's not a ton of textures to those old tracks. It can be done, it's just tedious more than difficult.