The city of Chicago from Driver 2 comes to BeamNG! This features the city in its entirety along with enhanced trees, greatly enhanced draw distance/frame rate, enhanced water and additional buildings. Having been bulldozed at the request of Mayor Daley in 2003 much to the dismay of the aviation community, the airport of Meigs has been restored and is now usable again! The runway is just about long enough for the B25 to take off and land again. Credits: Reflections Interactive - Original Map Aces Studios - FSX Buildings James_UK - Converting, enhancements, geometry fixes SOAP (Driver Madness) - Writing the City extraction tool. Known issues: 1) 5843 trees were manually replaced by hand. Due to the size of the map, you'll more than likely find a couple I'll have missed. I mainly focused on replacing the trees around landmarks and points of interest. 2) The level extractor I used for this had problems with "visibility lists" which left me with a large job of reconstructing large areas of the city (This alone alongside the tree replacements took around a month of work). Like the trees, you'll probably end up running into sections I've missed around small sections of the city and some back alleys. 3) You'll see a fare amount of flickering/Z-Fighting on certain areas of the map. This didn't occur on the Playstation 1 as it had no hardware Z-Buffer. I can't do much about this as it'd involve subltly adjusting 10's of 1000's of geometry tiles. 4) The grass doesn't have grass traction properties. Again, this'd involve and adjusting the texture material assignment of each grass tile on a per tile basis as they use a "texture atlas" which is shared with the concrete barriers on the sides. There's 10's of 1000's of them. 5) Due to the tile based technique that Reflections used to create the city, you may notice some texture filtering problems with the Roads/Grass. 6) In the air, you'll notice that many buildings don't have roofs. 7) Near some slopes/walls of the highway, you'll notice very minor seams. 8) Not all props have been cleaned up from back alleys due to a strange problem I ran into where some polygons started disappearing from the city once it was imported back into BeamNG. 9) Due to clashing normals, you might get stuck in some wooden fences. 10) On some objects, you may notice some small texture mapping issues. In closing, having worked on this for around a month along with studying maps of Chicago for the placement of the extra buildings, I'm amazed at how accurate some of the road placement is in relation to the real city. Moreso when you consider that the city was designed to run on a Playstation 1.
The level extraction tool doesn't support Driver 1 level extraction I'd convert the Driver 1 Cities in a heartbeat if the tools ever support them
AFAIK, there aren't any tools that specialise in level extraction of Driv3r. Someone did a test port of a small section of Driv3r's Miami to the Rage Engine a while back though.... I did a test port of Havana a while back. It still needs a lot of work done to it as it's missing chunks of the city and I need to see if there's any trees in BeamNG I can use to replace the 2D billboard trees.
the buildings on goose island are very unfinished and the props make some ways unpassable. But I am still having a blast with the map
I was like 10 when I played this last. Really amazing how modern games can mix and match old tech like this. Edit- I remember driving all the way out to this location to watch the traffic jump this part of the highway at highway speeds. Is the map the original size? I don't remember it being this large in Driver 2. I was a little kid so I could be wrong but damnnn. I see why I spent so long just cruising around the map.
The map you see here is as it was in Driver 2. The increased draw distance alone really emphasises just how big it is. I can imagine that Reflections must have been so frustrated with the limitations of the hardware they were dealing with. It surprised me initially at first. More so when it took around 8+ minutes to drive around the highway loop at speed. On another note, one thing I noticed pretty early on when working on this is that it appears as if Reflections intended to have the rivers connected together at somepoint. The geometry just about connects together. Presumably it was cut due to tech limitations of the PS1.
It's actually almost 1/1 with real Chicago. Meigs Field to the Aon Center in real life is 3 miles. It took 2.8 in game. Not bad for a game made in 2001.
On low settings with a i3 cpu and a Gtx 745, I get a even 25 fps even though its massive! my new main RP map.
I think we can even get the Driver: SF San Fransisco. But i dont know. im not sure either if it can be imported in a format that beamng would like to use.
