Page 1 of 9

Midtown Madness 3: Unofficial PC porting project

Posted: Sat Aug 01, 2015 9:28 pm
by SuperSecret
Edit (July 23, 2017): The project is currently inactive, I will upload the Unity project when documentation and refactoring are finished.

Long story made short: Yallis posted on MM2C his reverse-engineering of the MM3 cars format, I wanted to go further: I begun reverse-engineering also the cities and making (or at least try to) a porting of MM3 to PC using the Unity engine. I have not made much so far, and I don't know if I will ever finish it, but here is a preliminary build. It features some menus, the vehicle selection screen, and a city viewing mode. Also here is the Unity project with (only) the source code.

UPDATE August 10, 2015: I made some fixes to the city loader (missing and messed up buildings are now fixed, and roads are placed properly) and added a simple loading screen at city loading.
Links:
Build 2 (Requires "Data" folder from Build 1)
Unity project code

UPDATE August 14, 2015: Implementing proper vehicle physics is not a walk in the park, especially with the new wheel collider in Unity 5. On Unity's asset store there is an excellent vehicle physics system, (here is a demo) but it costs 60 USD, and I don't feel like spending this sum of money on something I don't know if I will ever finish. If enough people are willing to donate something, I will buy the asset so I will be able to make in a reasonably short time at least a demo in which you can drive the cars in the cities.
Donation link removed on July 23, 2017

UPDATE August 14, 2015: carking1996 was so generous to provide himself all the 60 USD, I can proceed with adding driveable cars. Anyway, further donations are welcome if anyone wants to donate. (side note: I didn't check how much Unity effectively charged, it didn't show VAT, so it cost effectively 65.39 EUR = 72.92 USD, the difference of 11.79 EUR is not much, and I paid it)

UPDATE August 15, 2015: I just made a build in which you can drive cars. Cars are still in a very preliminary stage (no sound yet, as I have to decode the MM3 cars' sound script file, and the handling is not yet the same as the original MM3 one, also there are some shader bugs). You can download the build here. (Requires "Data" folder from Build 1)

UPDATE August 15, 2015: My box.com account has reached the 10GB monthly bandwith limit, so the box.com links don't work now. I reuploaded here the Build 3, and here the Data folder.

UPDATE August 30, 2015: Build 4 is available, you can download it here. (it requires the Data folder from Build 1) Here's the changelog:
  • Loading screen modified, now it's rendered with proper size and aspect ratio (the selected car's loading screen now is also used)
    The car color/skin selected in the menu now is also loaded ingame
    Car tuning and stability improved - now cars behave much more like in the original MM3 (even if still not in the same way)
    Added a small temporary km/h speedometer in the upper left corner of the screen
    Car cameras fixed
    Ingame camera FOV changed from 60

Posted: Sat Aug 01, 2015 9:37 pm
by Franch88
This is an amazing and ambitious project. Good work and good luck with it! :D
Great work with the menus working so far, and the cars and cities ripping is very good. :) One building in Paris is messed up.

Posted: Sat Aug 01, 2015 10:51 pm
by SuperSecret
I know, it's not just one building, it's several buildings, some are messed up and some are missing some polygons (I have to figure out their specific primitive type). Also, some textures are not what should appear ingame (water for example, since it uses a special shader).

Posted: Sun Aug 02, 2015 1:21 am
by mm2mm1fan
This sounds very interesting :o, keep up the good work. :)

Posted: Sun Aug 02, 2015 12:57 pm
by KingAndy
That sounds an awesome work, even because I guess a lot of people including me never had the opportunity to try MM3. Good luck with your project. :)

Posted: Sun Aug 02, 2015 8:22 pm
by sajmon14
I never tried MM3 too, it will be cool to finally play it :)

Posted: Mon Aug 03, 2015 5:03 am
by HummersRock
This is really cool. It would be awesome to see this finished, but that would take a lot of work. It doesn't look like you would need to do a whole lot more to have a rough version where you can drive through the cities with any of the cars.

Good luck with this.

Posted: Mon Aug 03, 2015 5:07 pm
by BIGzee
This is actually one of the most serious projects I've seen here on mm2x, besides MMClone. GREAT WORK already with the prelim-build :aprobar:. Another big step for MM-kind. And Thanks for sharing it with us too.

But 'Unofficial' porting... means you're porting the MM3 resources directly and the ones that can't be ported, you're making from scratch.... is it ? :roll:

Again, there's no other project that I'm looking forward to SOO bad. Hope this doesn't get Hiatus-ed :pray:. I could literally pay for your coffee :biggrin2:

Posted: Mon Aug 03, 2015 6:33 pm
by SuperSecret
"Unofficial" simply means that this porting to PC is not made by Microsoft/DICE, the resources (cars, cities, sounds, menus, etc.) will be the original ones. The game logic will also be the same, since it was written in lua scripts, so the source code is available on the Xbox game disc (lua scripts are interpreted, not compiled) and can be used without any significant edits (provided that the external functions called in the scripts are implemented)

Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2015 10:05 pm
by BIGzee
Source code is available 8O !!!
(lua scripts are interpreted, not compiled) and can be used without any significant edits
So, 'significant' to 'heavy' source code level editing is possible, even after the completion of the project 8O !! Now I'm even more eager to see this complete, as a flexible game :heartbeat:.

Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2015 10:52 pm
by SuperSecret
With "source code" I meant the code of the scripts regulating the logic of career missions, races, cruise mode and such, not the entire source code of the game.

Posted: Wed Aug 05, 2015 5:53 am
by Kunal2045
Really looking forward for this. I hope to see this finished, but take your time. ;) Best of luck!

Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2015 9:27 pm
by SuperSecret
Build 2 is now available. I made some fixes to the city loader (missing and messed up buildings are now fixed, and roads are placed properly) and added a simple loading screen at city loading. The download link is in the first post.

Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2015 10:38 pm
by Franch88
And the buildings issue is fixed. Keep it up! :D

Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2015 6:13 am
by HummersRock
Awesome.