Midtown Madness 2

[sick seal]

with the new updates of dxwrapper, its now working with RTX Remix

install dxwrapper (ddraw.dll) and turn on d3d7 to 9

and install this config

original map didnt work well however because of lags

[calm belfry]

oh wow!

amazing

@novel knot to make sure you see this

[sick seal]

yeah thanks for the good work !

[sick seal]

current bugs :
HUD and Menu not appearing
AI Car texture disappear (proably issue of alpha blend in RTX Remix i had seen this in various games

[low pilot]

let's talk here @sick seal

very excited to see it working

finally

[sick seal]

categorie 3 texture as sky texture
the sky texture
the cloud texture
and texture looks like this
this one which made the car to show correctly

different map could be different but it looks like this

remember to use my rtx config above which made the game to be more stable

[low pilot]

ok tell me about remix capture

does it work as well?

[sick seal]

idk you try

i can capture but didnt import

you can try

[river swallow]

Is the hash stable for the texture/mesh replacement?

[sick seal]

❔

[low pilot]

my work here is done

[low pilot]

he means if the hashes are stable for texture or mesh replacements

you can check them in debug view

[sick seal]

@low pilot btw can you send me original MM1 build with no open1560

lazy to find one lol

[low pilot]

thing about remix is that this flat 2d texture and the steering wheel can possibly all be converted into actually 3d dashboards because if the hashes are stable

[sick seal]

well mm2 dashboard is actually 3d model, but 2d

[low pilot]

its a flat 2d plane with texture

[low pilot]

you got the game now?

[sick seal]

nah

[sick seal]

i think its a no

[low pilot]

@sick seal can you check this and record a video again?

[sick seal]

its full of red

but stable

nvm i messed up something

there

[low pilot]

its stable

except for the water body

[sick seal]

true

[river swallow]

Good

[low pilot]

that means mesh replacement is possible

[mild lava]

Wow, the performance in this latest build of dxwrapper seems way better when paired with remix now. Which gpu do you have?

[low pilot]

actually it would be very easy to replace assets in this game because shared hashes on street lights and trees

[sick seal]

an RTX4070s

[mild lava]

Oh, a 40 series card, I wonder if its the omm doing its thing. Could you please check if the whole game gets red if you check "is opaque" in the debug view?

[sick seal]

guess not

[low pilot]

that's just a low res texture that needs adjustment

why is the car opaque tho

[sick seal]

its not opaque when render tho

[low pilot]

it is used for reflection probably

just like how the ground was semi transparent in Midnight club 2

could be fixed by replacements

[simple halo]

TIME TO REPLACE EVERYTHING WITH CJ MODEL!!!!

Its really interesting even the world is stable

This makes me so excited

[low pilot]

or just make a quick toolkit AI mod to see how it looks with PBR assets before working on it

[sick seal]

i need an AI mod to fix alpha blend opaque texture

[low pilot]

did you try octotex?

https://github.com/alex-suspicious/OctoTex

[sick seal]

nah im going to try that

[sick seal]

do that works with tga

anyway so to get this project working we gunna do 3 things

1. fix the menu
2. fix the lags
3. get the texture working

[low pilot]

did you try taking a capture and viewing it in remix toolkit?

@sick seal btw in settings turn off reflections if you have it on already, maybe that's what's causing opaque texture

[sick seal]

not yet unfortunately

[sick seal]

where ?

[low pilot]

MM2 graphic settings

[sick seal]

i will try tomorrow

[low pilot]

settings everything to low except textures, model details and visibility to high

[sick seal]

but honestly i think its not where the problem from

i had seen this issue in 5+ game from 1999 to 2013

[low pilot]

we shall see tomorrow

[novel knot]

Unfortunately, I noticed this on many DX7 and older games. They use 2D menus and other things in the game.

[novel knot]

Yes, I was using color blending to display the 2D items and switched to using a pixel shader. Should be much faster in most cases. I know that RTX Remix does not work well with shaders but it is the only way to do color keying in Direct3D9.

[river swallow]

@sick seal I'm just curious, are you from Hong Kong? I noticed that you play maps of Hong Kong in OMSI and MM2.

[sick seal]

ye

[river swallow]

Yeah, me too, finally found a HK ppl in remix channel, are you going to mod this game?

[sick seal]

very nice but which game ?

[river swallow]

MM2

[sick seal]

mm2 ? yes but im not professional

[river swallow]

Do you have any experience in modding games, specifically with remix mods or modding other games?

[sick seal]

i just love using mods for games, but im not a developer

and thanks god im not the only guy to discover those in Hong Kong

[river swallow]

I really love this game, perhaps I can create a remix mod for it. However, I still need to finish working on something for NFSU2 first.

[sick seal]

me too, this game is my childhood

[river swallow]

During my teenage years, I used to play this game on MSN Zone most of the time. It was my most played online racing game.

[sick seal]

i love how this game still has a strong community which creates tons of mod to make this game better

but MSN Zone is gone since 2000s 😔

[river swallow]

That's sad, I actually made some friends on MSN Zone and even meet them in real life. It was a fantastic website for gathering and playing with local people.

[sick seal]

its amazing that the HK community was alive for about 12 years

[river swallow]

Which website are you referring to? Uwants or something else?

Oh the uwants mm2 channel is gone.

[sick seal]

it was very alive back in 2000-2012 in different forum

[low pilot]

@sick seal can you extract the textures of cars?

[sick seal]

7zip

from .ar

im not at home rn so i cant do this at this time

[low pilot]

we need hash and .dds file

hash is important

[sick seal]

which part of cars ?

AI？

since user car are rendering fine

[low pilot]

Drivable one

[sick seal]

oh ok i will send you once im back to home

[low pilot]

I need to remove lighting data from it and apply PBR, then you can test it as a replacement

Because they have pre baked lighting information on it which will mess up the PBR process

Maybe madness club can give a solution

[sick seal]

ah

[low pilot]

anyone working on this?

[sick seal]

not really been busy with works recently

[agile roost]

Where'd you get this map from? Did you make it on your own?

[river swallow]

I want to give this a try, but I'm having trouble loading the game with remix. Every time I try to load the actual game scene, it freezes. Remix only seems to work during the preloading scene (scene/vehicle selection), and the game resolution is very low.

[novel knot]

BTW: I created a branch for Midtown Madness 1 and put in a hack that I think should get it working. It does require adding additional lines into the ini file: DdrawOverrideStencilFormat = 80 and ForceExclusiveFullscreen = 1

[sick seal]

made by hong kong community in 2012

[sick seal]

did you use my config

it should work without dlss frame gen

[low pilot]

@sick seal this is for midtown madness 1

https://github.com/elishacloud/dxwrapper/tree/Midtown-Madness

[river swallow]

I've tried both with and without your conf, but it still doesn't work.

[sick seal]

what's yo GPU

[river swallow]

4090

[sick seal]

damn that's better than my 4070

you did put rtx.conf in folder right

and you have nhook ?

[sick seal]

didnt seem to work

[river swallow]

I have already created numerous remix mods, so I believe I haven't made any mistakes.

[sick seal]

ah yes

do you got any error message

[river swallow]

Wait, it can run now, but there are heavy visual bugs, and the screen resolution is still very low.

[low pilot]

use widescreen fix and increase visibility from in-game settings

[low pilot]

what about MM2hook

https://github.com/Fireboyd78/mm2hook

[sick seal]

nhook is newer

[sick seal]

you can set it higher

[sick seal]

you forgot to category texture sseem like ?

[river swallow]

My mouse is behaving strangely in the game. It is unable to click the Remix imgui menu properly.

What are your in-game settings?

Some of the in-game screens appear as textures.

[sick seal]

me too, cursor doesnt appear

[sick seal]

everything high

[sick seal]

well this is texture of rtx remix capture probably, seen this on all game

[river swallow]

The textures are visible in Remix, but after capturing, many of them fail to load correctly. This makes it difficult to work on texture replacement.

[low pilot]

oh crap

[river swallow]

Oh, It's visible in Remix Toolkit

[low pilot]

i wonder what format it is

[fast drum]

lol is it rendering the "widescreen mode" to a texture

if you press w the game has a letterboxed widescreen mode

[river swallow]

Texture replacement is technically possible, but it's challenging to recreate a new texture without the original one as a reference due to the texture format issue. As a result, I'm not currently focusing on this task. Instead, I'll shift my attention back to modding NFSU2, MC2, and GTASA. Perhaps I'll wait for the remix to fix the texture format issue before continuing my work.

[sick seal]

mm2 uses three type of image file mainly

ranked tex > tga > bmp

you would need .tex file to do texture replacement in original map

[river swallow]

Are you sure? Have you created any remix mods in the past?

[low pilot]

What about PBR textures

[river swallow]

@novel knot Huston, we have a problem
#general-remix message
It appears that the texture issue is originating from the wrapper, which is causing problems with the Gli texture format.
#general-remix message

[novel knot]

Yes, Midtown Madness supports a max resolution of 640x480. So not much can be done about that without hacking it.

[novel knot]

In what way is the texture issue coming from the wrapper? Can you give me more details?

[novel knot]

That is how the game was written. Dxwrapper is just trying to convert it to DX9 directly. I try as much as possible to do call-for-call translation.

[river swallow]

The wrapper is currently utilizing the Gli texture format to the renderer, and when we capture the scene, remix saves the captured texture directly in that format. However, most texture editing software nowadays does not support this format, making it difficult for us to properly replace the textures. Is there any possibility of switching the output to another texture format that is compatible with the modern texture editing software?

[novel knot]

Actually dxwrapper does nothing with the texture format. The game directly puts data in the texture surface by itself. dxwrapper just gives the game the DX9 texture memory address and then game puts data in there.

It would cause perf issues if I tried to intercept the data and change it on the fly.

Besides. Dxwrapper knows nothing of texture formats.

Maybe a Gli texture converter needs to be made?

[river swallow]

But Gli was released in 2009, while the game itself came out in 2000. How is it possible for the game to use a future format that was not supported at that time?🤔

[novel knot]

That is weird. Unless it is done by D3DX?

[river swallow]

How can I determine if it was done using D3DX?

[novel knot]

It seems that Gli texture format is from OpenGL. There is no code related to that in dxwrapper.

I can make a build that disables D3DX and see if the issue remains. But that will be a bit of work...

[river swallow]

Okay, thank you. Perhaps it can fix other games as well.

[novel knot]

Are all the textures Gli? If not, which textures are Gli? It might help me figure out what's happening.

Here is some data that may help you: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3d9/texture-support-in-d3dx

[river swallow]

Here are some of the Gli textures. Most of them are in the Gli format, while only a few textures (specifically the transparency textures) are in the common DDS format.

[novel knot]

I was hoping to find out what part of the game uses these textures. For example, the car textures or the sky textures, the menu textures, etc.

Do you think it is possible that DXVK is dong the conversion?

I really don't believe that dxwrapper is doing this. I wrote every line of code in dd7to9...

[river swallow]

As Nvidia Mark mentioned, it seems that Remix doesn't alter the texture. It's possible that DXVK is responsible for this, considering that the Gli texture format is also used in Vulkan engines.

[novel knot]

That makes more sense to me. Maybe the format used by the game is too old and so DXVK converts it to something they know about.

Maybe we can find a texture tool that works with Direct3D9 and can pull the textures directly.

This way we can see what dxwrapper is giving to Direct3D9 before DXVK gets it.

[river swallow]

Hmm, that seems to be the fastest way to resolve the issue.

[river swallow]

Found something in Remix GitHub:
https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/dxvk-remix/blob/main/RtxOptions.md

[novel knot]

"rtx.usePartialDdsLoader bool True A flag controlling if the partial DDS loader should be used, true to enable, false to disable and use GLI instead.
Generally this should be always enabled as it allows for simple parsing of DDS header information without loading the entire texture into memory like GLI does to retrieve similar information.
Should only be set to false for debugging purposes if the partial DDS loader's logic is suspected to be incorrect to compare against GLI's implementation."

[river swallow]

I have tried enabling and disabling it, but there is still no difference.

[novel knot]

I recommend dumping all the Direct3D9 textures. This way you can see what textures are coming out of the game/dxwrapper. Check out this page: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1491783680

[calm belfry]

@river swallow can you just set up a script to modify the header in all of the dumped files?

[river swallow]

Yes, I can. However, even after changing the header, the texture still doesn't display correctly. It seems to be in the wrong texture format. I will need to find a converter that can convert it to the correct texture format.

[calm belfry]

interesting. the one you sent earlier worked perfectly with DXT1

[river swallow]

In game texture look like this

Edited header texture look like this

[calm belfry]

ah weird

[calm belfry]

http://www.nigels.com/glt/

i found this. supposedly it supports GLT DDS handling

[river swallow]

Some textures look completely different from the original ones.

[river swallow]

Wait, is GLT the same as GLI?

[calm belfry]

oops. i must have searched wrong lol

supposedly this library supports it: https://freeimage.sourceforge.io/

[river swallow]

My broken brain can't comprehend C++ source code at 5 a.m., I think it would be better to try working on it tomorrow.

[river swallow]

Sadly specialK not working in MM2.

[river swallow]

⭐ For those who are interested in texture replacement⭐
I have make a script that provides a temporary fix. It changes the texture header from GLI1 to DXT1, allowing other texturing tools to load the DDS file format.
However, please note that the texture itself is not converted correctly. If you intend to use it for AI upscaling, it will not work as expected. I will search for a library to convert the texture to the correct format later.

Installation:
Requires Python 3.x or above.
Place the script outside the folder that requires administrator rights.

How to use:
Simply click the browse button to locate the capture texture folder and press proceed. This will automatically convert the texture headers from GLI1 to DXT1.

[mild lava]

Does that affect the original file or does it create a copy of it?

[river swallow]

It affects the original file, but it creates a backup. The reason for editing the original files is to allow you to see what the texture looks like in Omniverse. Since it allows you to select the folder where you want to edit the texture, if you prefer not to edit the original, you can simply copy the texture to another folder for conversion.

[dull lion]

So to get RTX working in MM2 is there anything more I need? Do I need to install dgvoodoo before running Remix?

[low pilot]

You need dxwrapper

Specifically this one https://nightly.link/elishacloud/dxwrapper/workflows/ci/master/dx7 binaries.zip

And then use it with remix

[dull lion]

I have to install dgvoodoo first before I can use it right?

[low pilot]

Uhhh I don't think so because dgvoodoo wrapper converts old dx7 code to d3d11 or d3d12

We need it to be dx9 so that it runs with remix

[dull lion]

Okay but MM2 usually doesn't boot on modern operating systems unless dgvoodoo is installed and settings are adjusted.

I wonder how OP dealt with this

[low pilot]

@dull lion #1216305912558653552 message

[dull lion]

Again I'm missing messages, had downloaded that rtx.conf sometime ago too

[low pilot]

Dgvoodoo is a wrapper just like dxwrapper, it's sole purpose is to translate those old draw calls to modern equivalent

While it's true you need it to run on modern systems

It just doesn't imply in the case of remix

[low pilot]

You can always check out modDB for rtx.conf files as well

[dull lion]

Actually since you mentioned it I'm pretty sure that's where I got my rtx.conf

Alright well might as well get MM2 working, or try to at least. Thank you.

[low pilot]

Yeah sure, if you have any problems lmk

[dull lion]

I will.

[low pilot]

did anyone try with the latest remix builds?

[harsh wolf]

2025?

[visual fable]

I will try this when i get home on the 14th unless someone beats me to it.

[low pilot]

try nuhook and dxwrapper. Maybe remix capabilities could be extended by lua scripting (could be accelerated by use of coding AIs like claude)

Currently this game renders everything in its draw distance which means it's very cpu heavy

[vagrant verge]

Hi, I'm trying it with this: https://github.com/elishacloud/dxwrapper/releases
And without dgvoodoo, although my game lags a lot without dgvoodoo, but just to see if I can at least try remix in mm2.
Is "Dd7to9 = 1" the only setting i need in the wrapper ini? I'm using the wrapper's "ddraw.dll" file besides the dxwrapper.dll. Without the Nuhook mod for MM2 it just doesn't run, and with the mod I get this error at the end of the console:
Do I need to do something else to the wrapper ini perhaps? Or try a different wrapper or different method?

I come from a MM2 fans discord called Midtown Club where we have made a lot of mod these last few years. The game is extremely moddable by now, but of course Remix would take that to the next level for graphics

[low pilot]

I think you only need dx7 version of dxwrapper and that's probably it

[vagrant verge]

ah alright, gonna try that one 👌

its the one in the same link i posted right?

cause it gives me the same error in the NuHook console, ill see if i can solve it

oh it stops happening if i remove the d3d9 from remix 🤔 ill try adding it with a different name to the wrapper ini

[low pilot]

https://github.com/elishacloud/dxwrapper/actions/runs/20508314701

Get the dx7 game binaries and try an older version of remix runtime release

I'm really trying to get the first game to work but that game is fundamentally flawed and may never work so due to pre transformed vertices that are projected directly into screen space and originally rasterized by a blitter (d3d, OpenGL)

[clever forge]

can you share link of that group? is still active?

[vagrant verge]

I'd say it's active enough, not super active but definitely not dead lol: https://discord.gg/hFsM2WVThW

[clever forge]

Buddy is there any graphics mod or mm1 mm2 ?

Rtx remix etc?

[vagrant verge]

No

I dont think anyone has made a proper RTX Remix mod for MM2 and i couldnt run Remix on it myself yet

Some people in that server have tried Reshade on MM2 but i havent myself

[low pilot]

Why can't you run remix if I may ask?

[vagrant verge]

i get this error at the start if i use Nuhook with Remix and then it closes. Without Nuhook and with Remix the game simply doesnt run

[low pilot]

Odd, same error occurs with modified dxwrapper for dk2 rtx comp with midtown madness 1

Create process failed with open1560

[vagrant verge]

I havent tried older versions of Remix yet though, I still gotta do that at some point

[low pilot]

This game sort of works

But texture replacements were not possible last time I checked

[clever forge]

How about other titles? Gta san andreas remix? Is it worth as compared to definitive edition?