Proto:Midtown Madness 2/Beta 1 (MM3323)

This is a sub-page of Proto:Midtown Madness 2.

This article is a work in progress. ...Well, all the articles here are, in a way. But this one moreso, and the article may contain incomplete information and editor's notes.

This page is rather stubbly and could use some expansion. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue this article?

To do: There's more: Add images and sounds if needed. Find and document more unused stuff.

Build MM3323, dated June 29, 2000, was sent out to beta testers. Nowadays, however, it requires a date checks patch in order to be played.

Interface

• The logo was different. The "Madness 2" part of the logo was smaller.
• The Aston Martin DB7 Vantage in all of the menu backgrounds had a visible license plate, however, it was blurred out.
• The text arrangement of the about menu was different.

Early	Final

• The splash screen was different.

Early	Final

• There was a unique loading screen used on both cities. The final game replaced this with separate loading screens depending on the city and selected race. The splash screen will be used when neither are found.
  
• The select vehicle screen was slightly different. Horsepower was written as "Horse Power", Top Speed was known as "Acceleration", Durability has been moved slightly to the right, and the width of "Select Vehicle" was decreased in the final game.

Early	Final

• Some of the cars' showcase menus have different images and missing specifications:
  • Audi TT:

Early	Final

• • The showcase picture of the City Bus was reused from the previous installment.

Early	Final

• • The showcase picture of the London Cab was taken from a 3D renderer software. In the final game, it is known as the "London Black Cab" for some reason.

Early	Final

• • The showcase picture of the Mini Cooper Classic was different and of lower quality.

Early	Final

• • New Mini Cooper

Early	Final

The showcase pictures of the VW New Beetle RSi and the VW New Beetle Dune reused the same showcase picture and specifications from the VW New Beetle as a placeholder.

Early	Final

Early	Final

Unused Menu Screens

• Placeholder VW New Beetle RSi showcase screen. It still exists in the final builds of the game, completely unused
  
• Placeholder SF Stunt Driving School screen
  
• Leftover from an early menu design. Several UI elements from an early design and leftovers from Midtown Madness also exist in the texture folder.
  

HUD

• The HUD's damage meter had no "DAMAGE METER" text written on it.

Races

• Almost all races and crash course events were different in routing and weather.
• All Crash Course events take place at noon.
• London Leap used to be called "Mind the Gap".
• Many of the races' names had different, generic names. The numbers were removed for readability. Races that have the exact same names as their final counterparts (i.e. Ignorance Is Blitz) were omitted.

Blitz (SF)

Early	Final
Busy Freeway	Hold On Tight
Against traffic	Wrong Way!
To the Golden Gate	Golden Race
MultiPath!	Presidio Push
Air Cut	Amazing Grace
Precise Jump	Lombard Lunacy
All Around	Embarca-dare-o
Coit Nightmare	Telegraph Turnaround
Good luck!	Coit Nightmare

Circuit races (SF)

Early	Final
You can fly!	Hang Time
Soma	Gimme SOMA
Lombard?	Wind It Up
Getting faster	Midtown Mayhem
Presidio	Presidio!
Parking lots	Square Dancing
Not for wimps	Circuit Breaker
All around the city	Floor It!

Checkpoint races (SF)

Early	Final
Welcome to San Fran	Racing 101
Civic Center	Deck The Hall
It's a gibbon	Golden Hour
Long Is The Road	City Tour
China Town	Foggy Memory
Golden Gate Park	Park & Ride
Fast race	The Hills Are Alive
No luck...	Lookout!
Cops	Wanted!
Complex	After Hours
Almost there	Full Speed Ahead
Beat this!	Panoz Pressure

Blitz races (London)

Early	Final
bridges	Embank On It
THE Tower	Tower Tour
Hyde Park	Hyde And Go Seek
Sub's way	Going Underground
Nelson's visit	Battle of Trafalgar
Chauffeur's nightmare	Crosstown Sprint
Getting Tight	Alley Cats
Do you 180's ?	Midnight Mash
Hyper Runabouts!	Five-Ring Circus

Circuit races (London)

Early	Final
I call it: Mini Race!	Mini Race
Big Ben	Round Westminster
View from a bridge	View From Two Bridges
Park loop	Parks But No Parking
Tower	City Circuit
Tubular	Underground
Fast Lap	London Run
Gimme some royalties	Gimme Some Royalties
Hand brakes please	Soho Mojo
Dizzy Yet?	Zany Zigzag

Checkpoint races (London)

Early	Final
it's a start	Top Of The Morning
potential jump	Bridge Bash
park race	Through The Park
Me first!	V & A Visit
Mini vanity	South Bank Brawl
Use the Tube Luke	River Thames Run
circuit within	Circuit Within
Trafalgar scared	Check This!
Jump they say	Splish Splash
Shortcut freak	Cut It Short
runabouts	Dizzy Driving
Challenging	Foggy, Foggy Night

(Source: The Racing Madness Wiki)

Audio

• Every audio file for all of the announcers was missing, as all of them had placeholder lines spoken by Angel Studios developers (i.e. "UK Sportscaster Aston Martin DB7 Loser Line 1"), suggesting that the speech was still being recorded at the time. Two announcers for San Francisco (as3 and as6) were planned but were scrapped. Also, lines for cop density, locations, opponent progress, pedestrian density, "blitz-specific race progress", final lap, "race start during race commentary", and traffic density were planned but were scrapped.
• The Panoz Roadster's selection sound was different. Its sound, PanozSelect.22k.wav, can still be found in the final version's mm2aud.ar file.
• phoneimpact.22k.wav and tubevoice01-03.22k.wav are not present in this build. Both of them were later added between July and August of 2000.
• UIreplay.22k.wav is present in this build, intended for the cut Instant Replay feature. It was removed in the final version of the game, although it was later restored in MM2 Revisited and with MM2Hook.
• SFwalla.22k.wav is 3 seconds longer in this build, but in the final game, it was shortened to 6 seconds.

(Source: The Racing Madness Wiki)

Vehicles

• All cars had slightly different performance.
• The Freightliner Century originally had an attached trailer, however, due to glitches that caused it to fly high in the air when hitting walls at high speeds, the problems couldn't be fixed, so the trailer was cut from later versions of the game, but can be restored with third-party modifications.
  • For this reason, the Silver Eagle Fire Truck, a fixed-trailer version of the American LaFrance Fire Truck, was made in case the trailer system for said truck didn't work, however, it did work, and it ended up being scrapped as well.
• The New Mini Cooper (R53) had two fog lights on its grill, but for unknown reasons, they were later removed from it, thus they were cut from the final version of the game. The cut fog lights can still be seen in the final version's help file. Also, the car's name was not uppercased.
• The Aston Martin DB7 Vantage's colors had different names; Periwinkle (Islay Blue), Rose (Southerland Red), Cobalt (Mendip Blue), Verdigris (Chiltern Green), and Scorcher! (the final name has no exclamation mark in it).
• The Panoz GTR-1's custom paintjob, Secret Shadow, was originally named Phantom.
• The Ford Mustang Fastback's Classic Chrome paint job is absent in this build because it was not made yet at the time.
• The Aston Martin DB7 Vantage was simply known as the Aston Martin.
• The American LaFrance Fire Truck was simply known as the Freightliner Fire Truck. Also, its Dalmatian paintjob's name is misspelled as "Dalmation".
• There is a test vehicle named the Moon Rover. It is not present in the final game's files. Angel Studios jokingly claimed it "burned in a launch pad accident".
• The Audi TT (8N)'s unlockable paintjob, Wing Cho, is present in this build, however, it was cut from the final game. The cut 1959 Cadillac Eldorado has a paint job similar to the TT's Big Kitty paint job, which could be why the Wing Cho paint job was cut in the final release.
• The VW New Beetle RSi's paintjobs, Reflex Yellow and Vapor Blue, had slight differences. Said car had the Team Panek, Cup 99, and Green paintjobs, but the former was cut and the latter two were replaced by Cup 2000 (this paintjob had red "LUPO" text written on it at one point in development[18]) and Silver paintjobs, respectively. A Cheetah paintjob for this car was also planned, but only damage textures remain.
• Make Love, Not War! and Offroader paintjobs for the Light Tactical Vehicle were cut from the final game. The Desert Storm paintjob also lacked camouflage.

(Source: The Racing Madness Wiki)

Tracks

• There is an unused track named j01: Son of Sleazy (j01), a test track full of taxis and pedestrians, but without cops. In fact, it was used as a base for Midnight Club: Street Racing's New York track.
• There are seven test tracks stored in the build's files. Most of them can be restored with third-party modifications:
  • Physity is a rectangular track that has some roads and asphalt but has objects used on San Francisco and London, even though this is another of one of the test tracks. It has traffic and pedestrians, but only the American taxi cabs from San Francisco are used as traffic vehicles in this early test-bed. While it does have a sky dome, sky_dawn.pkg, it is misplaced. It was presumably used to test objects, traffic, and pedestrians.
  • Banktest is an early test-bed made particularly for testing banked turns. It features asphalt, a few banked road sections and some long, straight cobblestone roads. It doesn't have a hudmap, so attempting to turn it on by pressing the Tab key will crash the game.
  • City is another early test-bed track that was a test for Angel Studios. It contains roads and some asphalt.
  • Variant is yet another(!) early test bed city. It is basically San Francisco but without any buildings other than some parts of the Golden Gate Bridge, and it also lacks a lot of water and a textured sky.
  • LondonDave and Dave are early versions of London. Unlike SFAI, traffic, pedestrians and cops aren't available, as enabling them will crash the game. Gaps and glitches exist, such as scrambled buildings.
  • SFAI is an early version of San Francisco. It has traffic and pedestrians, but cops are not available. It has several gaps, missing building geometry, and there's no textured sky and water.
• Other test tracks are also referenced in the game's files but their files do not exist: sfjunk, london_old, londonbrad, londonwithsubs, sfbrad, london_sup, london-orig, london02, london_marc, sf1, and sf2.

(Source: The Racing Madness Wiki)

Midnight Club: Street Racing leftovers

• In the tune folder, there are two files named VPMITSUCLASSA-25.vehcarsim and VPMITSUCLASSA-25_OPP.vehcarsim, both dated December 28, 1999, leftovers from Midnight Club: Street Racing's development, which highly suggests that Midnight Club: Street Racing started development around 1998 or 1999 along with Midtown Madness 2 and Smuggler's Run.

(Source: The Racing Madness Wiki)

Developer Tools

Inside the anim folder of MM3323C archive, two executables of Angel Studios' Test Art tool - testart and testart_ogl (DirectX and OpenGL pipelines respectively) can be found, which is a pedestrian model viewer. Various pipeline options can be tweaked once a BFG config file with this option enabled, has been loaded. There are several of them left in the anim folder by the developers of the game. A new config will be created using your current Windows account name on program's first start.

The D3D Pipeline offers far more options than OGL:

In the city folder, a very comprehensive SDL Viewer tool (sdlview) can be found, which is the tool used for setting up the cities for the game. Unfortunately, no leftover SDL files were found, so they have to be made from scratch or converted from the existing PSDL (Processed SDL) files.

In the geometry folder, pkgls outputs offset size information of input PKG file and tallystatic outputs CSV with tris count of input PKG file.