Jesus the map is so simple and empty looking at it now but it felt so real to me back then. I loved both the difficult missions and just roaming around the map for hours.

For me personally, there's nothing like real world locales in video games. MM, Driver series, True Crime LA/NYC, Midnight Club, and so on. So many game worlds, so little time. I'm barely into the video but I absolutely love the effort you put into physically going to the city, explaining the philosophy behind real world maps, the appeal and the methods needed to creating them. Limitations are also really good to know because it helps other amateur modders like myself an idea how we could better represent real cities.

I was obsessed with London due to this game. Must have spent hundreds of hours expanding every nook and cranny yet looking back it's amazing something so barren and simple could captivate me so, guess my young age had something to do with it lol

This is so relaxing to watch and being informed on games I have played till death. Keep them getting posted!

Next video idea: A 90minuite deep dive into Stymie Bold Italic and any tenues links to racing games. I joke but I would still watch it.

Some little bits on the technical part. Internally "Blocks" are actually called "Rooms", "Blocks" were what the community initially called them and was the term used by the community for a while. There are some additional helper functions when drawing the city. When drawing intersections (the pavement part specifically), and building roofs, the game checks if the camera position is below this, and skips drawing. Iirc it also checks if building quads are facing the camera as well. To get uselessly technical, most things (collidable objects, vehicles, 3D building facades) are "entities", and each entity belongs to a room. Upon drawing each room, it checks entity visibility before drawing. Overall a very enjoyable video as a long time player and modder who knows way too much about the engine :D

@TimberwolfK

Жыл бұрын

Thanks! That makes a lot of sense given they're using a technique which grew up around indoor-based games where the rooms would be, well... rooms. I find it fascinating when you look at this older stuff the lengths developers would go to *not* to transform and draw polygons, and then you get to today's situation where the graphics cards are such floating point and fill rate monsters you're better off leaving the geometry the same between frames, giving anything you want to animate a vertex shader and letting the card sort it out.

@ZanaGBYT

3 ай бұрын

Are all of the development and moding tools in use these days open-sourced and available on a website? or is still all of that knowledge locked away into some discord, waiting to be destroyed and losing more knowledge than when MM2X, MM2BR and HQTM closed shop together nearly 16 years ago?

I remember when I visited London back in 2017, it was impossible for me not to draw comparisons with MM2 in-game London and was so fascinated to finally see all those landmarks in real fife. It was a priceless nostalgic feeling

this video deserves way more views for the quality of it

Never been to London but I feel like I know it a little bit thanks to MM2. I remember my first visit to SF, I spent most of the time going to see the different landmarks that I had driven past in the game 😄

@TimberwolfK

Жыл бұрын

It's quite a surprise how much of the city they manage to represent with so many technical constraints. Obviously there's no hope of using the game as a map, but you can still get an idea where things are relative to each other.

@RoundenBrown

Жыл бұрын

The Getaway for PS2, I got to know London through that one.

oh man, I've just found your channel through the openttd tutorial and am now bingewatching all the videos. I love your style! Especially the technical explanations

@TimberwolfK

Жыл бұрын

Thanks, it's something I got into by accident and discovered I liked picking apart how these old games worked. Although it does mean it takes a fair old time to research what ends up being 2 minutes of video and a couple of hastily-drawn diagrams!

Very nicely made video for an old favorite game of mine! Glad to see you mentioned/used Revisited in some parts, old project of mine. Even learned something from this video, about the City of London trash cans. In Revisited v6, I have already replaced some bollards in that area with an unused variant of the prop, decorated in the City of London style that you show in this video. May look into changing the trash cans outside of that area of the city too, as a little detail to fix...

Amazing video essay! Honestly learnt quite a few things about London and Midtown.

Nice video, used to play MM a lot when I was 6-8, moved to London this month hahaha

When I was able to travel to London at Easter 2022, I was comparing it in my head to what I knew in MM2 and it was absolutely mindblowing how much I recognised despite the simplicity of it. I was able to navigate myself fairly easily just from memory (and some help from Google Maps).

@TimberwolfK

10 ай бұрын

While simple, it's very good at establishing the relative location of things - something visitors to London often struggle with as the Tube heavily distorts your picture of what's happening on the surface (not just the map, but that different lines travel at quite different speeds - London feels a lot smaller when you're on the Victoria line!)

Marvellous stuff. I have a London A-Z from 1998 (as I realised on a trip to London on Saturday) so that would have come in handy. That font though. Lovely work, and really well explained how the game did the graphics!

@TimberwolfK

Жыл бұрын

Midtown isn't too bad for that because it only goes in for the "unlikely to be demolished any time soon" landmarks. (Although I was surprised to find the BFI IMAX, that was very new when the game came out!) The Getaway on the other hand... that definitely would benefit from a vintage A-Z, amongst other things it features Mondial House and a very pre-development Shoreditch.

Can’t wait for the next bollard video!!

I love the london buses and Cabs

Thanks a lot for this video! I always wanted to know how accurate it was cos it felt pretty good

Thanks for making this, childhood game

I had a great time with MM1 and MM2. I drove around for hours getting the police to chase, and then weaving through heavy traffic to watch them crash in the rear view mirror because they couldn't follow. I still haven't seen any games that let you have as much traffic as MM2 on max traffic density.

I love this sort of thing, especially visiting places I know in real life. Watchdogs Legion is interesting.. some of it is mapped really well some bits are missing but being set in the near future under a totalitarian regime I'm sure the government death castle instead of a large chunk of Oxford Street can be explained via the plot. Also nice Beautiful South reference!

19:47 indeed, a few professionals in the modern game industry had their start modding MM/MM2 :) not nearly as many as started off modding the FPSes of the time, but a few

Hello, I absolutely loved this video! MM is my favourite game series, have you ever played my personal favourite of the series Midtown Madness 3? I still play both 2 and 3 to this day, and to a lesser extent 1, reckon you would ever do a video about MM3?

@TimberwolfK

4 ай бұрын

Only very briefly, and I'm not sure I even remember where! (I think maybe the Cambridge Centre for Computing History have an original XBox somewhere, can't think where else I played it)

I played soo much Midtown Madness 2 as a child. I loved driving around London and San Francisco. It looked so real to 12 year old me. I love games that take you to real places.

Cool stuff

Nice job on this video, I've always loved midtown madness as a kid.

This is a really cool video. What tool do you use to display the whole city at 12:18?

@TimberwolfK

Жыл бұрын

If I remember correctly it's MM2 City Toolkit.

I'm also guilty of buying games for a familiar setting (particularly now that I live far from home and get homesick). I find train sims terribly boring but got Train Sim World 2 on sale just for the Boston map. Unfortunately the feeling of "being there" falls apart pretty quickly with the constrained area to explore and the awful passenger AI. I'm currently "playing" Watch Dogs 1 without driving cars or fighting anybody: just walking or taking the train through the impressively-detailed Chicago. I credit the "being there" feeling to the gameplay focus on invading pedestrians' digital lives, spurring a development focus on pedestrians with diverse behaviors and scenes like stopping to tie their shoe or vomiting into a trash can. One of my perpetual OpenTTD goals is playing in real-world geography. Someday I'll get serious about developing a patch to import real map data, but until then I'm enjoying my scenarios built from real heightmaps and city locations.

@TimberwolfK

Жыл бұрын

It's a weird synchronicity that Watch Dogs has done the cities from Midtown Madness 1 and 2, in that order... if they announce another one set in Paris, then we'll know they're up to something! I love real-world OpenTTD maps but I always struggle to get the scale right... I want to have a London with the distinct areas so there are dedicated stations for Wimbledon, Bromley, Southwark etc. but then that means having a map where a trip to Glasgow takes several years! One thing which might be interesting is a distorted map where areas of high population density take up disproportionately more space, although that definitely needs some kind of automated preprocessing.

Top video sir, have you had the opportunity to play the first midnight club game? I remember it was made by the same studio that made the first two midtown madness games, and featured london, albeit a darker themed london, but it was made to run exclusively on the almighty playstation 2, perhaps the map is more fidel to the real city than the one in this game. It has been a long time since i played midnight club street racing, but if you get a chance you can check it out

@TimberwolfK

Жыл бұрын

A couple people mentioned it, I never played it but did check out some videos. Looks very like the Midtown map in places, although I think they extended it further east to give a bit of Canary Wharf and the area around there.

nice

Nice and interesting video! Maybe you could make a ranking video of games that portray real cities with your two categories? I'm also fascinated by games that take me to real places. If you are reading a script, could you find a better position for the teleprompter? It's irritating that you look next to the camera the whole time. And also one can see your eyes following the text very much. If there is no better way to do it then maybe it would be better to do it with voice over images/video?

@TimberwolfK

28 күн бұрын

This is quite old and I switched to using a proper Pepper's Ghost teleprompter some time in... probably mid-2023? I tend to leave the old stuff up apart from a few bad ideas and anything with catastrophically poor production quality as there is still hopefully some entertainment value to be derived from it, and perhaps as proof that it's possible to slowly learn this stuff by trial and (mostly) error.

How did you rip the map to show us on 12:12?

@TimberwolfK

Жыл бұрын

It's a program called MM2 City Toolkit - should be available on MM2 eXtreme.

How does the London in Midnight Club compare? It was made by the same developers at the same time using the same engine but I think it's slightly different.

@TimberwolfK

Жыл бұрын

I never really got into the Midnight Club games, bits of that map do look very familiar from MM2 although it expands further east and has things like the A40 Westway on the other side of the map. From what little I can see on videos they do appear to have merged the Limehouse Link into the Rotherhithe Tunnel...

@Mahoromatic

Жыл бұрын

@@TimberwolfK What about the London in Italian Job? That game is very good for a PS1 title.

There are many things Watch Dogs Legion does wrong but it again combines both sense of place and landmarks in a similar way but also not because it's having to pretend to be a bit "in the future" in some kind of far right governed hell hole (imagine that). It's a really good London. I don't know SF but I'm pretty certain I believe WD2 as well.

@TimberwolfK

Жыл бұрын

It's one of those games where I don't have a huge amount of interest in playing the game but I'm still tempted to get it just to see what they did with the city. It's definitely the reason behind the one Assassin's Creed game I own. (Which after they did an update now has an annoying launcher and keeps crashing, thus in turn providing the reason I don't own WD:L)

@Yesterzine

Жыл бұрын

@@TimberwolfK WD2 is on game pass if that helps, so presumably WDL will eventually be.

M25 Racer!!

Cozy