Hey there! Nice to see ya again, Morgan! Still owe you a whole freaking lot for designing those outfits for Frink-ality for me so I didn't have to bother re-learning Blender. Your work has been consistently pretty darn great!

Nobody blames you for wanting to take a bit of a step back. Modding I would definitely consider an entry way for many into the game development process, which is already pretty exhausting in it's own right. The work you placed into your modelling over the years has been pretty apparent.

I've spoken to a couple of people over the years that have definitely experienced emotions of burnout similar to what you've described, and feel I've gone through similar emotions myself. It's incredibly easy to think of a concept and have visions of how to build towards it, but the actual work itself can become almost overwhelming. It's not something you should fault yourself over or beat yourself up over.

I still definitely look forward to Smokin' Bouviers when it does drop! I haven't tinkered with the Fully Connected Map mod as much as it's embarrassing to say. The concept of a smoking ban as the primary driving force for the plot sounds like a lot of fun and plays nicely into Hit & Run's gameplay mechanics allowing you to get in trouble with the law. It also reminds me a fair amount of Homer vs. the Eighteenth Amendment in a way.

I can understand not wanting to invest tons of years into making the custom map a fully realized reality, and you're doing a lot more than you think by working on it by yourself. It's brave to admit you'd rather take the time to step away and just leave it be for now to focus on other things. A lot of fan projects feel like they get lost in that cycle of trying to make something grand, but there's always going to be an audience if you ever decide to return to it. I've followed a couple of pretty big fan projects. While not quite on the same scale, Sonic Robo Blast 2 was a game I played a lot when I was a wee lad on my Windows XP laptop. Huge modification of the Doom Legacy source port that's been in development since 2000, and the version I played on my laptop was 1.09.4 back in 2006/2007. Still super excited to see updates years later, and the quality jump from that old version to the latest release is insane. If you were ever to return to Los Springeles, I'd definitely watch for updates!

I absolutely share your sentiment with adoring Hit & Run as well and the amazing content people have created for it. Hit & Run to me is a bit more than a licensed game, which is why I continue to be a part of the community and hold the title in such high regard (despite it's caveats). It's creativity and spin on the open world formula that Grand Theft Auto ended up establishing is fantastic for a variety of reasons. It's wonderfully unique with it's Level structure and overall cartoon-iness that is somewhat attached to the IP the game is based off of. If anything, Hit & Run kinda represents a now dead genre of open world games that haven't really been seen since the Saints Row franchise. There are few games I can name that take Grand Theft Auto's structure and purposefully play around with being fictional to play around with concepts that would otherwise be more questionable in something more grounded in reality. Saints Row got pretty goofy around the third entry to differentiate itself from GTA further (introducing concepts such as alien invasions and superpowers), and the experiment was mostly a success. Hit & Run kinda has something similar going for it with Level 7 purposefully paying nod to the Treehouse of Horror entries, introducing a zombie invasion and aliens you have to kill. It's absolutely wonderful, and not something that I think most 'Triple A' developers would bother with these days. That and the simple satisfying nature of the Story Missions is why I keep coming back to it, whereas I haven't really finished any Grand Theft Auto entries I've actually touched.

I'm honestly super glad to see more perspectives of Hit & Run as a whole, and I still look forward to seeing you around! You've done a great job hosting and collaborating the mod jams you were in charge of to drum up activity and there were some great things birthed from it (looking at you, Think of the Children!). Thanks for all you've done and sharing the same interest in this game!

Happy Modding to you as well! Don't be afraid to reach out to me again if need be!

- Kenny

Ah! I had forgotten all about this! I remember the albums catching my attention too when I was looking at the 70's Sports Car textures. I think I approached Lucas about it way back in a private chat, and he managed to find the source? That conversation is a pain for me to find though, so I did some reverse image searching. Managed to find it!

It's the album art for Labyrinth: Read Along Adventure:


The original conversation I had with Lucas was ages back and would be an absolute pain to dig up, so I tried rediscovering it on my own.

I used Waifu2x in order to upscale the car's textures slightly and got this result using the Photo upscaling setting. I then cropped just the album art and used Google Image Search to find it.

There is indeed a mod that does remove the wreckage that Colou also made ages back! Sadly it’s for Level 2 only, but it can be used for a mod rather easily as opposed to decompiling Donut Mod 4 for the assets instead. Currently, a public version for Level 5 does not exist as far as I’m aware?

There is also another modified version that adds traffic nodes to allow traffic to pass through the area wreckage, but also adds some other things as well to the map that aren’t exclusive to the Matlock Expressway area.

Way back when I was using Windows 8.1, I had an issue where the installer would sometimes not properly detect Disk 2 after I inserted it and clicked 'OK'. Is that what's happening here, or does it appear as if it's just having difficulty copying over music00.rcf? I was able to fix the previously mentioned issue by running the installer again.

You could also try to create a CD image of all three Disks using something such as ImgBurn. Assuming the program is successful creating a disc image, you wouldn't have to worry about the CDs becoming scratched up any further?

Otherwise, yeah. Perhaps heed Maz's advice if it seems to be a case of really unfortunate luck and both CDs are too scratched to get the data off of them.

I don't think anybody means personal offense by not having yet replied to it! I can understand some of the frustration, but I think it's the amount of effort to get it all put together.

Mod requests are usually a fun way to get ideas going or to gauge interest, but I think most wouldn't want to just port one character model from a game over to another one. A wide variety of Star Fox models being ported as a mod pack seems like something that has a bigger chance of happening? So if someone were to make a Star Fox character model pack port, Krystal using her model from one of the GameCube era Star Fox games seems like it'd have more chance of happening.

Don't be discouraged if nobody replies! I think a Star Fox pack would be cool, but it's a matter of capturing someone's interest and porting the models over with some animations that fit the models okay.

Since I received word from Loren that the issue with Spoiler tags was sorted due to a smaller oversight in the website's CSS code (which hopefully might be mentioned in the Tuesday Topics thread for this week!), I went ahead and added a spoiler tag. Mainly because I originally intended to add it when re-formatting your original post and it seems like that's something you initially wanted? If you'd rather not have it, I understand and the spoiler tag can easily be removed!

I also made one other small edit in that banjo's listing incorrectly stated that the track is used in Ketchup Logic. The last mission to make use of that track is actually L4M2 (Redneck Roundup). I'm not sure if it was an issue with my original custom soundtrack tagging or not, but I figured for accuracy sake I'd go ahead and edit it.

Many thanks for taking the time to compile this! Like the regional list Addy made a while back, I feel this will be very useful for those who want a quick reference.

Thanks for dropping the idea here on the forums!

We haven't entirely ruled out the possibility of reusing previous maps from the past Levels. Not only would it assist in speeding up development (which is obviously taking a while and is on standby at the time writing), but there's also some merit in having the ability to re-explore previous areas with some fresh ideas added...Such as said mansion! Obviously, it's not something that could be re-explored with the new Level 4 for fairly obvious reasons, but adding it back to Level 1? That's an interesting idea, especially since most of the mansion is already finished and simply blocked off from the player in the vanilla game.

I believe I can speak for the team and say we're decently satisfied with the current mission structure of Level 1, so I'm not quite sure if any missions would be adjusted to fit the inclusion of the mansion in any meaningful way. Perhaps L1M7, but I think the current route where you drop off Burns flows well. I suppose it would then be left towards designing it to host some extra collectibles? I could see a Collector Card being pushed back into there or a Wasp Camera.

I did speak with Loren in private a little while back and there were some plans of re-organizing the mod's internal structure to handle the new regions a wee bit differently from how we currently handle them so the mod's file size is ever so slightly less bloated, so perhaps Level 1's locations could be re-examined there? Off of the top of my head, I'd really like to adjust the Giant Toilet path to have a couple of more visual indicators that the player can access it, as I've seen some struggle knowing that area is open.

If you have any further ideas on how to expand Burns' Mansion for Level 1, I'd love to hear them! Thanks for the feedback.