Recent posts

#1

General NFS / Re: NFS High Stakes EXE addres...

Last post by nikon - Today at 6:36 AM

In the video where I was testing the 16-car knockout, I came across an interesting sorting (?) issue.
In the second race, two AI drivers had exactly the same finish time, and they happened to be right on the elimination cutoff.
There were 11 participants, with 4 to be eliminated. The two AI drivers were clearly in a close battle and crossed the finish line at the same time, taking 7th and 8th places respectively.
However, the AI driver who finished in 7th place was eliminated instead of the one in 8th place.
I think this might be related to how the results are sorted when the finish times are identical, but it needs further investigation. In practice, I think this is probably a fairly rare occurrence.

This is a known issue, i had that happen multiple times and it's quite funny to happen but yeah it's there. Maybe it's like in TrackMania United Forever where the game displays hundreds of a second but it actually counts thousands of a second but won't display

I didn't know about that, or maybe I just forgot...

I haven't really investigated this issue yet (I already knew it couldn't have been caused by my changes).
But this is actually normal behavior for quicksort: if the values being compared are equal, their relative order isn't guaranteed.
The comparison function returns 0 for such objects,
so you'd need some kind of secondary criterion: the driver's name, for example,
or something ese, to decide which one goes above the other.

I remember being a bit surprised at first that the game only renders half of the car,
actually even less than that, when you're using the cokpit camera.
When I was testing the mouse look idea, I was initially a little disappointed,
because it seemed like the game simply didn't render the full object.
But it turns out it can be made to work properly just by removing the filter that decides which parts to render depending on the side.
(that might increase the hardware requirements a little, though...)

#2

General NFS / Re: NFS High Stakes EXE addres...

Last post by nikon - Today at 6:08 AM

For Tournament mode, you can theoretically set more than 7 AI opponents as well, but in that case you won't be able to complete the entire tournament.

Why is that, i wonder?

There are quite a few places in the game where arrays are hardcoded for 8 slots.
Probably the most obvious example is the points table - it's an array of 8.
But there are many other places like that.
Actually, getting a 16-car tournament race to start is pretty easy.
You only need to change this byte:

Code Select Expand

00146B22  10 → 11
Just in case the offsets don't match, here's the surrounding code:

Code Select Expand

Offset(h) 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0A 0B 0C 0D 0E 0F
00146B10  8B 9C 24 20 01 00 00 83 FB 01 0F 86 F6 00 00 00
00146B20  83 FB 10 0F 83 23 01 00 00 8B 84 24 08 01 00 00
00146B30  89 84 24 34 01 00 00 85 C0 0F 8E D7 00 00 00 89


This switches the sorting mode when there are more than 15 objects (I still haven't figured out why the game does that).
But this change only lets you start a race with 16 cars - all the other problems I mentioned above are still there.

#3

General NFS / Re: NFS High Stakes EXE addres...

Last post by pete9516 - Today at 5:20 AM

For Tournament mode, you can theoretically set more than 7 AI opponents as well, but in that case you won't be able to complete the entire tournament.

Why is that, i wonder?

#4

General NFS / Re: NFS High Stakes EXE addres...

Last post by pete9516 - Today at 5:15 AM

In the video where I was testing the 16-car knockout, I came across an interesting sorting (?) issue.
In the second race, two AI drivers had exactly the same finish time, and they happened to be right on the elimination cutoff.
There were 11 participants, with 4 to be eliminated. The two AI drivers were clearly in a close battle and crossed the finish line at the same time, taking 7th and 8th places respectively.
However, the AI driver who finished in 7th place was eliminated instead of the one in 8th place.
I think this might be related to how the results are sorted when the finish times are identical, but it needs further investigation. In practice, I think this is probably a fairly rare occurrence.

This is a known issue, i had that happen multiple times and it's quite funny to happen but yeah it's there. Maybe it's like in TrackMania United Forever where the game displays hundreds of a second but it actually counts thousands of a second but won't display

#5

General NFS / Re: NFS High Stakes EXE addres...

Last post by pete9516 - Today at 5:12 AM

Posting Youtube links (or embedding them) is fine, go ahead.

Thanks for the permission!

16-car tournament testing:

16-car knockout testing (+ custom eliminated car count): 

As an example, you can see that when there are 16 participants, no traffic cars appear.
However, starting from the second race, after 5 participants have been eliminated, 5 traffic cars appear.
In the knockout video, according to the setting, the number of traffic cars should then remain at 5 for all subsequent races, even when more than 5 slots become available (from the third race onward).

The research is still in an early stage, and there are quite a few things that still need to be checked and tested.
I also used the EXE file patched with the veg.by mod as my base, so the patch may not be compatible with other patches or modified executables.

VEG's patch is completely compatible with the older Expansion Pack/Stock Pack version as the file sizes are completely the same. So all my Delta Patches work on both of these versions. That's the good think about it

#6

General NFS / Re: NFS High Stakes EXE addres...

Last post by nikon - Sep 08, 2026, 11:05 PM

That career editor will turn out awesome.
Is there any way to have 16 racers outside of career mode, in single race for example?

I think it should be possible eventually.

Thanks everyone for the feedback!

This is still just the very beginning, and for now I'm mainly focused on Career mode.
I haven't gotten around to Single Race mode yet.

I'll try to consolidate my current work and put together a preliminary patch as soon as I can, but I can't promise when it will be ready yet.

With the current editor, you can set up to 14 opponents in Knockout mode (giving you 15 cars in total).
That's the maximum that can work in the unpatched version, as pete9516 mentioned above.
The player will also be placed in the last starting position for every race (although it's actually pretty fun to start at the back of the grid).

For Tournament mode, you can theoretically set more than 7 AI opponents as well, but in that case you won't be able to complete the entire tournament.
The points system also doesn't work properly, and the Standings table crashes the game.

I've managed to overcome most of the issues I described above, and with the patch, 16 participants are quite playable.

#7

General NFS / Re: NFS High Stakes EXE addres...

Last post by Venko - Sep 08, 2026, 10:44 PM

That career editor will turn out awesome.
Is there any way to have 16 racers outside of career mode, in single race for example?

#8

General NFS / Re: NFS High Stakes EXE addres...

Last post by EvoX - Sep 08, 2026, 10:09 PM

In the video where I was testing the 16-car knockout, I came across an interesting sorting (?) issue.
In the second race, two AI drivers had exactly the same finish time, and they happened to be right on the elimination cutoff.
There were 11 participants, with 4 to be eliminated. The two AI drivers were clearly in a close battle and crossed the finish line at the same time, taking 7th and 8th places respectively.
However, the AI driver who finished in 7th place was eliminated instead of the one in 8th place.
I think this might be related to how the results are sorted when the finish times are identical, but it needs further investigation. In practice, I think this is probably a fairly rare occurrence.

yeaaah, another cool nfs4 channel, subscribed 👍

#9

General NFS / Re: NFS High Stakes EXE addres...

Last post by Herms - Sep 08, 2026, 9:02 PM

Very interesting observations. 16 car tournaments look like a lot of fun. Even 14 cars with a few traffic would be neat. Good luck in your research and thanks for sharing!

#10

General NFS / Re: NFS High Stakes EXE addres...

Last post by nikon - Sep 08, 2026, 6:31 PM

In the video where I was testing the 16-car knockout, I came across an interesting sorting (?) issue.
In the second race, two AI drivers had exactly the same finish time, and they happened to be right on the elimination cutoff.
There were 11 participants, with 4 to be eliminated. The two AI drivers were clearly in a close battle and crossed the finish line at the same time, taking 7th and 8th places respectively.
However, the AI driver who finished in 7th place was eliminated instead of the one in 8th place.
I think this might be related to how the results are sorted when the finish times are identical, but it needs further investigation. In practice, I think this is probably a fairly rare occurrence.