Remko and I have been shooting PM's back and forth about the old Motor City Online mod for NFS High Stakes. He was nice enough to supply me with his backed-up copy of it and a bonus traffic pack (thanks, Remko!)
And I was looking around the Web a little bit and realized that there is another, somewhat-living MCO mod. I was surprised to see that this has been maintained up until the end of 2009... and maybe still is, the guy has a YouTube channel under the username WideoPL.
So if any of you MCO or old muscle car fans want to check this out, here's his site:
Motor City Offline (http://motorcityoffline.republika.pl/)
And I checked the links, it is indeed downloadable but really slow to download from here where I am (servers are, as you might guess, in Poland)
It looks well-organized and all, i have yet to see how it really works and what bugs are in it, but this is why I shared it with NFSAddons. Maybe I will contact the author and ask him about making an NFS HS Mixer-compatible installer...
anyway have fun! :)
-FM-
Been meaning to reply to this for a while, sorry.
Yeah, I heard of this, I came across it a year or so ago when I was searching the web to see how much MCO-related stuff I could still find. When I saw the preview pictures and movies, I wasn't too impressed, because it didn't seem to be much more than an NFS4 mod consisting of Sniper's MCO-to-NFS4 conversions, bundled with a couple of NFS4 add-on tracks by various authors. All of which have been available on the net for quite a while
The fact that he initially asked money so that he could mail you this on CD also kinda put me off.
After you brought it up I decided to give it a try anyway, and although my first impression proved to be right, in all fairness the guy put in a bit more work than simply bundling add-on cars and tracks made by others.
For starters, it's a self-installing file, and you don't need to have NFSHS installed to play it: it comes with all the necessary NFS HS files included and installs them automatically on a location on your hdd where you point it to.
I did meet one bug with this, though: Every time I ran the game and got past the Loading Screen, it would crash immediately with this error message:
STREAM - unable to open file 'F:\Data\Audio\Music\menu1.asf'In the end, I saw no way to be able to run the game without copying my MUSIC folder from my original NFS HS install to my F: partition. It worked after that, but kinda defeats the purpose of having this installed independently from the actual NFSHS.
The menus look nice, based on MCO graphics, and I like what he's done with it.
It does seem that he's been borrowing from another mod, though, because not only does it have the same bugs that the the original Detroit Muscle mod had (hanging loading screen until you press the space bar, drop-down menu not working in the opponents menu), there are even two buttons labeld 'DM Credits' and 'Update DM' that he didn't bother to remove. :lol: Still, he did change some of the in-menu texts to reflect the changes.
The cars all seem to be based on Snipers's conversions. They are easy to recognize from details such as hood scoops, custom wheels, wide tires, etc. Not to mention in a few cases the names have been unchanged from how Sniper called them (1970 "Vixen" Mustang).
But he did something different: ALL of the 34 cars have a full career mode with 3 upgrades, whereas Sniper only released 4 of these. Plus, unlike Snipers's cars, every car starts out as a a "rust-bucket", just like in the original Motorcity Online. I think this is a nice touch. Some of the cars really look desperate. :p
I only did a few test laps, so I can't really tell if the performances are different from Sniper's base cars, or if they actually change during the career mode, too. They feel pretty fast overall.
I think he did something with the sound, because the engine rumble sounds more resonating, as if you're driving in tunnels all the time.
Car classes are matched to decades, so you've got the 30's and 40's in class B, 50's in class A, 60's in Class AA and 1970's in AAA. Oh, and the police cars have been replaced with Snipers pursuit conversions too. Traffic is unchanged.
The tracks come from various authors, thankfully he credits them in a 'license' text: Blazn, Nfs_Track_Tigers, Twister86, Tim Storck, Andreas neuer, Nite, Creek, Nfswill, The Dutchpeople, Fangio.
He did go as far as to come up with new names for most of them. Not sure what the original authors would think of that. :/
I haven't been able to drive all of them, but I don't think they've been changed themselves in any way.
I still think it's worth a look, if you have no problems with the issues I listed above. here's a few screenshots:
(http://a.imagehost.org/t/0217/Motor_City_Offline_2010-06-06_16-38-37-34.jpg) (http://a.imagehost.org/view/0217/Motor_City_Offline_2010-06-06_16-38-37-34) (http://a.imagehost.org/t/0351/Motor_City_Offline_2010-06-06_16-39-25-92.jpg) (http://a.imagehost.org/view/0351/Motor_City_Offline_2010-06-06_16-39-25-92) (http://a.imagehost.org/t/0253/Motor_City_Offline_2010-06-06_16-41-56-18.jpg) (http://a.imagehost.org/view/0253/Motor_City_Offline_2010-06-06_16-41-56-18) (http://j.imagehost.org/t/0652/Motor_City_Offline_2010-06-06_16-42-38-54.jpg) (http://j.imagehost.org/view/0652/Motor_City_Offline_2010-06-06_16-42-38-54)
(http://j.imagehost.org/t/0959/Motor_City_Offline_2010-06-06_16-45-28-65.jpg) (http://j.imagehost.org/view/0959/Motor_City_Offline_2010-06-06_16-45-28-65) (http://j.imagehost.org/t/0361/Motor_City_Offline_2010-06-06_16-48-48-43.jpg) (http://j.imagehost.org/view/0361/Motor_City_Offline_2010-06-06_16-48-48-43) (http://h.imagehost.org/t/0652/Motor_City_Offline_2010-06-06_16-49-05-07.jpg) (http://h.imagehost.org/view/0652/Motor_City_Offline_2010-06-06_16-49-05-07) (http://h.imagehost.org/t/0565/Motor_City_Offline_2010-06-06_16-56-17-79.jpg) (http://h.imagehost.org/view/0565/Motor_City_Offline_2010-06-06_16-56-17-79)
(http://h.imagehost.org/t/0967/Motor_City_Offline_2010-06-06_17-13-48-54.jpg) (http://h.imagehost.org/view/0967/Motor_City_Offline_2010-06-06_17-13-48-54) (http://h.imagehost.org/t/0593/Motor_City_Offline_2010-06-06_17-35-10-42.jpg) (http://h.imagehost.org/view/0593/Motor_City_Offline_2010-06-06_17-35-10-42)
Pretty CooL Remko an FM just a fast Reply :D
Looks Nice old hot rods in HS Mod then,Rite?
So was alot them cars still Converted from ah
Sniper was his name? :)
Wow thanks for doing the thorough test, Remko :)
I've switched (actually downgraded) PCs for the moment :Squint: and I've yet to re-install HS. This mod is rather interesting I guess from your review, but I am glad you pointed out the errors. Making people pay for work that's not yours! :o
This looks like a mod that would be fun to improve? I like the upgrades idea. Oh well it'll be in my archives for when I get around to it...
Does anybody around here actually own MCO ? Maybe someone could have a look at the track files to convert them or at least use the textures.
As I found out earlier this week, it seems installing this still messed with the setup of my regular NFS HS game somehow, maybe in the registry, so I'll probably remove it again soon. Or maybe look up how to install NFSHS twice properly on one system, as I remember was explained in a thread here a few months ago.
@Freak-DS: I still have the disc from the MCO Public Beta from 2001. I never had the retail version but I assume the majority of the files would be the same.
If anyone's interested I can copy requested files and put them on a fileshare site.
I don't think I ever heard of MCO textures being imported into NFS HS tracks, I don't know if there was a technical reason or that nobody ever tried it before. The first one I've seen it do is this relatively new guy over at NFSCars: http://www.nfscars.net/file/list.aspx?game=highstakes&category=track&author=mco&sort=latest&order=desc&page=1
The changes are fairly small so far, but I can appreciate the effort.
I'd like to have a look at the track files; maybe there is a way to get them into nfs 4 - would be great, if you could upload these :)
http://www.mediafire.com/?yg0jx5wnyyz (87mb)
Here's the entire track folder from the MCO beta disc. (Let me know if I need to upload it to a different file hosting service)
I noticed some of these file folders are pretty large, I suppose that must be because some of these are separated into sections, in the same way some of the point-to-point tracks in the original TNFS were. Sadly I have no overview which tracks these are, and what the sections are called.
(these weren't real point-to-point tracks though, the idea was that you'd do a 180 degree turn at the 'end' and then drive the same track backwards)
I also don't know if these files can be viewed or edited with the tools that we have at our disposal for NFS4. I remember asking Nappe1 if he thought MCO tracks could be imported into NFS4, and he said he saw no way to do it - or maybe he said T3ed couldn't handle it (I don't remember exactly, it was during a chat session :p )
Anyway, hope you can use it for something.