Forza Horizon

Forza Horizon
Developer: Playground Games Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios Platform: Xbox 360 Released in US: October 23, 2012 Released in EU: October 26, 2012 This game has hidden development-related text. This game has unused graphics. This game has unused sounds. This game has unused text. This game has a prototype article

This game/console's online features are no longer supported. While this game/console's online features were once accessible, they are (as of August 22, 2023) no longer officially supported and online-exclusive features may be documented as now-unseen content.

Forza Horizon is the Forza franchise's first foray into open-world gameplay, the fifth overall game in the franchise, and the first Forza game not developed by Turn 10 Studios. It would go on to become its own sub-series that has seen ever increasing commercial success and critical acclaim for each sequel, even outperforming the elder Forza Motorsport sub-series itself.

Like with Need for Speed: The Run, when its online services closed on August 22, 2023, the console versions cannot be played with the respective console being connected to the Internet, as the game does not appear to support handling for situations when the game's server is offline or not.

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Prototype Info

Unused Text

List_Wheels

The main database in the majority of Forza titles is a SQLite3 database in db\gamedb.slt. This database contains just about everything about the structure of the game, from events and their restrictions, to car physics, to info about tracks. One such table is List_Wheels, which assigns all stock cars' wheels to the correct models, as well as listing all aftermarket rims purchaseable in the upgrade shop. In Forza Horizon, this table has evidently not been cleaned up, as it contains wheels for just about every single car featured in Forza Motorsport 4, despite most of these cars not being present in Forza Horizon.

There are also some other unused vehicle wheels which have never appeared in the franchise:

• FIS_Karma_12 - 2012 Fisker Karma
• SKO_FabiaRS_12 - 2012 Skoda Fabia vRS

Unused Textures

Debug Menu Background

Inside Media\UI\Texutres.zip are multiple subfolders, one of which is titled DebugMainMenu. Inside this folder is a file named DebugMainMenuBk.xds. This texture depicts a Toyota MR2/MRS Spyder on a background of what appears to be a warehouse and various lights. It is presumed from the file name that this served as the background image for some kind of debug menu.

DebugMainMenuBk.xds

Pre-Final Map Images

Inside Media\UI.zip is a folder titled "New Map". This folder contains a subfolder titled "Map Ref". New Map contains three different iterations of the final Colorado map, each with various colouring changes and tweaks to the surrounding mountains' topoolgy between them. Each is titled "MapGameReady" with a different suffix, one of which is in TGA format as opposed to JPG.

These map textures have been resized to 1280×768 for the purpose of uploading, from their original resolution of 5120×3072.

• 

  MapGameReady.jpg

• 

  MapGameReady.tga

• 

  MapGameReady_01.jpg

Unused Map

One of the other UI zip files, Media\UI\Textures\Horizon.zip, also contains multiple subfolders, one of which is "TEMP", which as the name suggests contains a few unused temporary files which were never cleaned from the retail build of the game. The most interesting of these is map.xds, which contains a detailed map of an entirely unused region. Judging by the location names featured on the map, it appears to be a blend of the Liguria and Tuscany regions of Italy. This is likely a very early plan/mockup of the map intended for the sequel, Forza Horizon 2, which featured regions from Italy and France.

map.xds

Leftover Developer Comments

Inside Media\Audio\Radio\RadioSystem.xml, leftover comments from the game developers related to generating info for the radio station soundbanks can be found.

Eventually this file will be auto-generated using the script.xml, but for now if you change any audio resources
referenced here, you'll have to rebuild the Soundbank info .xml (which will be built via the build server hopefully)

Run the game with cmdLine option 'generateradiosoundbankinfo', copy the resultant file from the XBox location
Xbox 360 Neighborhood\xb-username\E\game_mainline_user.name\Media\Audio\Radio\RadioSoundbankInfo.xml 
to D:\p4\horizon\Forza2\Main\Media\Bin\Release\Audio\Radio\RadioSoundbankInfo.xml and check it into Perforce.

There are also some more comments in Media\Audio\Radio\RadioDJVoxPops.xml:

List of low priority Festival Updates that we want to trigger if we haven't heard any Festival Updates for a while

Repeat between 1 hour and 15 hours as we only have a single VoxPop
If we resurrect some of the others we can reduce these timings