Driver Madness

Krishty wrote:According to this video, there is a tool Driver Damage Viewer that is not public, but it can display the damage data of Driver 1 cars (1:19)

Well the driver-car-importer ( from R1 to R4 ) has the damages viewer function.

https://code.google.com/archive/p/drive ... /downloads

Vortex wrote: Do you have instructions/files to do it ?

I do not have any instructions. You will have to launch the game, look carefully how the original model is constructed, and try to get the same effect. I can always help you with photos of my finished model.

Here is the file. Good luck! http://plpl8.pl/coronet2.pdf
(The PDF will be removed after several days but I can upload it again.)


Back to the topic:
Now, after unpacking the car models I noticed that some of their textures are missing. How can I get, for example, the Havana VW Bus texture? Does it involve searching for loaded textures in a saved game state file? I'm more into graphics and modelling than programming but if it isn't very difficult and doesn't need much more than a hex editor, I can try, why not.

The original download link by Krishty , is broken, so here is the archive with the global Driver 2 textures.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/jj21vfd44 ... extures.7z

Thank you!

I have some fresh models to be textured and exported to the game if somebody finds a way to do it. I know about the 256 vertices limit; the most here is 150 and it's the red one.

arklas wrote:Thank you!

I have some fresh models to be textured and exported to the game if somebody finds a way to do it. I know about the 256 vertices limit; the most here is 150 and it's the red one.

Well if you didn't saw it, the driver car importer has a "patching" function who remove the vertices limit.

I don't think that's necessary since I don't want my models to be better (more detailed) than the original ones.

Hello all,
I recently ported Driver 2's Chicago to BeamNG thanks to the level exporting tool for Driver 2. Having seen the city viewer linked above, is there any way to get Driver 1s cities in their entirety with textures in OBJ format like what Driver 2s level exporting tool does? I'd really like to try my hand at converting Driver 1s Cities as they appear to be in pretty good shape in the map viewer. (doesn't appear to be any problems with the "display lists" causing areas of the city to be missing.)

I was the guy who commented on your Steam profile, nice to see you post here about your work - it's awesome.

Skylabh wrote:

arklas wrote:Thank you!

I have some fresh models to be textured and exported to the game if somebody finds a way to do it. I know about the 256 vertices limit; the most here is 150 and it's the red one.

Well if you didn't saw it, the driver car importer has a "patching" function who remove the vertices limit.

Doesn't that bork reflections though?

helegad wrote:Doesn't that bork reflections though?

Indeed it's the case.

If I needed high quality car models, I would instead try importing the cities to another game, like BeamNG (as seen above). But I find that the archaic graphics quality is something that modern games don't offer, something that cannot be found anywhere else and something I sort of love about Driver. It is an inherent part of Driver/Driver 2 and with better graphics it wouldn't be the same game (like Driv3r, and I don't mean the ability to use weapons).

james_uk wrote:I recently ported Driver 2's Chicago to BeamNG thanks to the level exporting tool for Driver 2.
[…]

Excellent! I love the plane sequence!

james_uk wrote:Having seen the city viewer linked above, is there any way to get Driver 1s cities in their entirety with textures in OBJ format like what Driver 2s level exporting tool does?

I'm afraid not. However, the data format is VERY simple, and with some programming knowledge, one should be able to write a converter.

I have some OBJ issues scheduled for a client in summer. Once I get it done, I'll use the code to provide OBJ versions of the cities. But I cannot do it earlier, I'm afraid …

james_uk wrote:I'd really like to try my hand at converting Driver 1s Cities as they appear to be in pretty good shape in the map viewer. (doesn't appear to be any problems with the "display lists" causing areas of the city to be missing.

You are correct – the Driver 1 maps are from the PC version, and it doesn’t use display lists

arklas wrote:*cars*

Duuuuude! It's so Driver like! How do you make those textures?

They're made out of good quality photos but overly sharpened, reduced to the size acceptable by Driver, sharpened again, and limited to a very low number of colours, like 16 or 24. Non-coloured areas, such as head lamps, grilles, and bumpers were desaturated.
The red car texture was made out of black and white photos and then colourized. (Only one prototype car existed, in coral red, and was scrapped not long after being built. It's a 1960 Syrena Sport.)

I have some OBJ issues scheduled for a client in summer. Once I get it done, I'll use the code to provide OBJ versions of the cities. But I cannot do it earlier, I'm afraid …

Thanks so much for doing this. Will be looking forward to hopefully getting Driver 1s Cities ported across to BeamNG in the future. I have WIP screenshots of Las Vegas in BeamNG here if anyone wants a look. Release is still a long way off as the Display Lists in Las Vegas were even more broken than Chicago causing lots of missing tiles.

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/7656 ... reenshots/

cant wait for progress to resume on making the tool perfect

ive been busy with work as of late, but im still down for helpin out with a GTA mod that uses Driver cities

Still no OBJ progress. However, I managed to export the Driver 2 levels to VRML (.WRL); that should be compatible with many 3D modeling packages.

james_uk, if VRML is usable for you, I’ll go ahead and convert the Driver 1 maps in a few weeks. Otherwise, you’ll just have to wait.

Krishty wrote:Still no OBJ progress. However, I managed to export the Driver 2 levels to VRML (.WRL); that should be compatible with many 3D modeling packages.

james_uk, if VRML is usable for you, I’ll go ahead and convert the Driver 1 maps in a few weeks. Otherwise, you’ll just have to wait.

Sounds good to me. Will Driver 1s maps in VRML format have texture material assignments/UVs intact? Am I correct in understanding that VRML has the file extension of WRL or WRZ? Thanks again for you commitments to this

james_uk wrote:Will Driver 1s maps in VRML format have texture material assignments/UVs intact? Am I correct in understanding that VRML has the file extension of WRL or WRZ? Thanks again for you commitments to this

Yes and yes! Here’s a Driver 2 level so you can check if VRML is usable with your import pipeline: http://www77.zippyshare.com/v/qy76mN3i/file.html

Warning: Some software packages (e.g. Blender) are very slow with importing entire levels. I’d start with importing “object1073.wrl”. If that works, proceed to “tile41.wrl”. If that works as well, import “level.wrl”.

If the textures cannot be loaded, try converting them to PNG. However, maintain the .bmp extension OR open the WRLs in text editor and replace “.bmp” with “.png” everywhere.

Check ’em!

I have some questions on Driver 1 textures I’m currently extracting. I have lost track of all the tiny details in the driver series, so please forgive me if my questions are stupid/redundant:

Does this Red Bull commercial from L.A. ever appear in the game?

Googling for “Driver Red Bull” will just show formula one drivers Now that I found the correct palette, I wouldn’t want it in my game.

Does this cop car ever appear in-game?

I found the texture in the “Interview” archive, so it could also just be parked in the garage – however, the texture does have a damage model.

Does this McDonald’s parody appear in-game?

The only reference I find is this interview with a translation I find very hard to understand:

Who came up by means of the ˜MeDmonsons joke in Los Angeles in Driver 1, as a parody of McDonalds? (this can be establish in the textures for Driver 1)
The paste structure the metropolis had to approach up by means of fairly a few false cipher so it was actually up to them, now so extended as contain now not too shut to the original. We in progress so as to by means of Destruction Derby in fact construct had a variety of billboards devoted to talk to of the side and so as to continued eager on Driver.

Anyone noticed the Godfather quote on the wall in the Interview level?

Who sleeps wit de fishes there? Google revealed nothing.

Btw, Los Angeles contains a World Trade Center texture and a restaurant named “Adams New York Texture”, so I guess they tried to make a night version of New York similar to L.A. …

Krishty wrote:Warning: Some software packages (e.g. Blender) are very slow with importing entire levels. I’d start with importing “object1073.wrl”. If that works, proceed to “tile41.wrl”. If that works as well, import “level.wrl”.

Yes, even in 3ds Max. The 64 bits version doesn't have a VRML plug-in so i had to switch to the 32 bits version to test this.

Anyway, the scale model seems to be huge no?

Krishty wrote:

james_uk wrote:Will Driver 1s maps in VRML format have texture material assignments/UVs intact? Am I correct in understanding that VRML has the file extension of WRL or WRZ? Thanks again for you commitments to this

Yes and yes! Here’s a Driver 2 level so you can check if VRML is usable with your import pipeline: http://www77.zippyshare.com/v/qy76mN3i/file.html

Tried importing the first two smaller files which go without problems. I tried importing the city itself and the memory usage just climbs to the point where 3DS Max 2017 crashes. This happens 3DS Max 2017 (64bit). As of writing, 3DS Max 2008 (32bit) has been trying to load the city for the past 30 minutes and is now using 2.7GB RAM (UPDATE - It just crashed whilst still loading with no error message). Any chance of getting these in OBJ please? I wouldn't mind betting that the crashes/excessive RAM usage are mainly down to the way VRML is literally putting in every object as its own seperate "entity" in the 3DS Max scene. I should add that when I loaded up the OBJ cities in the past in 3DS Max, they loaded with textures in a matter of seconds.

The Driver 2 level exporter was able to export to OBJ. With 3DS Max's OBJ importer, you get the option to import the OBJ and all subsequent components of it either seperately (causes 3DS Max to crash due to memory usage) or combine them into one full entity which greatly reduces the memory usage and load times.

The VRML files use instancing, i.e. if you modify one occurance of a cone, the change applies to all cones in the city (same for textures etc.). 3DS Max probably screws this up, but that’s no excuse for the performance desaster (even if resolving everything, the city should import in less than ten seconds) …

… did you try any converters, e.g. this one? I just tried FreeCAD and it loads fine (albeit very slow, ~3 minutes), but I just can’t get the OBJ export working …

Just tried it but it doesn't preserve the materials or the UV coordinates. Importing the City into Blender seemingly causes it to hang there.

I can load the city into FreeCAD but for some reason when trying to export it to OBJ (or other file formats), it just writes a 72 byte OBJ file that has nothing in it.

Dammit! I’m sorry, but for now there is little I can do. My backend does not yet support OBJ, and my schedule is too tight to implement it right now. I’ll just spit out the VRML versions when decoding finishes, and you’ll have to wait for me or find a suitable converter …

Speaking of decoding: I found the correct palettes for the textures in my post above. Now Red Bull got even weirder. I also listed the strange “sleeps wit de fishes” (The Godfather) graffiti on a wall in the Interview level.

Skylabh wrote:Anyway, the scale model seems to be huge no?

Almost forgot that, sorry! Yes, the scale is huge. You’ll have to scale down by 256 because I used the fixed-point coordinates directly. It’s on my TODO for the next version!

Krishty wrote:Dammit! I’m sorry, but for now there is little I can do. My backend does not yet support OBJ, and my schedule is too tight to implement it right now. I’ll just spit out the VRML versions when decoding finishes, and you’ll have to wait for me or find a suitable converter …

Speaking of decoding: I found the correct palettes for the textures in my post above. Now Red Bull got even weirder. I also listed the strange “sleeps wit de fishes” (The Godfather) graffiti on a wall in the Interview level.

That's ok . I'm sure I'll find a means to convert them over to VRML. If I do, I'll try and document it

Krishty wrote:Does this cop car ever appear in-game?

I found the texture in the “Interview” archive, so it could also just be parked in the garage – however, the texture does have a damage model.

I’m sure it’s not used in the game because the quality is pretty low. Seems to be a leftover from the alpha or something.

I guess it’s well known, because Someone972 shows the texture prominently in the last seconds of this video: Nontheless, I’ll show some screenshots because I just managed to get vertex colors exported correctly:

Sorry for hijacking the thread for Driver. We’ll return to Driver 2 when my Driver 1 stuff is finished …

Krishty wrote:I’m sure it’s not used in the game because the quality is pretty low. Seems to be a leftover from the alpha or something.

Indeed the texture was used in the original rolling demo of Driver for the PS1.
I guess it had to be the demo presented by Reflections to GT Interactive, to convince them to publish the game later.

That helped me finding these videos:

This is the original rolling demo of Driver for the PS1 released on Disc 43 of the Official UK PlayStation Magazine in Feb 1999.