The Simpsons Hit and Run: Finale Spectacular Demo

Sorry, the prize has already been taken. And the hoverbike shooulllddd be black unless there's some error with your computer's color palette :p

dammit i was hoping you could put an anime character on the open wheel racecar

I forgot to mention I finally got around to trying the demo a while ago, and meant to give my feedback on it. However, I got sidetracked, but I finally made some time to go ahead and type my thoughts:

I really enjoy the concept of solely revising Level 7 to help it stand out more. The original Level 7 suffers from being a pretty dull Level that outside of the first mission has you constantly travelling back between the school and the Power Plant in it's missions. Most of the missions also felt really easy (outside of the final one) in comparison to some of the more sadistic stuff in Level's 5 and 6. While I love the design and the first and last mission, the rest of the Level falls flat in comparison to the rest of the game which is a shame. Again, the fact that you're aiming to throw your own experience of Level 7 onto the table is pretty neat.

I feel a little torn on the different traffic. I recall you stating that you wanted something less cheesy which is why the cars were changed. Surprisingly, they fit into the Level quite well and don't feel as out of place as I initially thought they would. The Cube Van fits really well into traffic as if the aliens are casually delivering packages on land, the Buzz Cola truck really drives in how far the aliens are pushing the cola into your face, and the Cell Phone Car works okay as well. On another hand, however, I feel the "cheesiness" of the original cars are something I kind of miss. The Treehouse of Horror segments that Level 7 is based on were really never taken seriously and got more ridiculous and more outlandish in terms of horror concepts as the series progressed. Having a flying witch broom to drive feels right at home with the ghosts floating around in Level 7, and I miss the diversity these cars offered. They were weird, but it was certainly the most interesting traffic group in the whole game just because of that diversity. This mod does a good job at keeping some of that diversity, but the traffic still doesn't feel as quite as special as it the original traffic.

The missions are a bit lengthy, but I had a pretty fun time with pretty much all of them! The difficulty feels pretty consistent with what Radical originally offered for Level 7, so it's challenging without being too demanding. Because of this, I find the longer missions to be pretty acceptable.

L7M1:

L7M1 takes the original concept of the first mission, and actually adds a couple more stages that work pretty well together. The "medication" stage got a good chuckle out of me, but the stage where you're expected to obtain the medication is a bit confusing:


The stage message index doesn't indicate that you need to go inside and the HUD map makes it confusing to figure out where it is. Because of this, I'd highly recommend adding an "Enter the Kwik-E-Mart" stage before it. I'd also recommend going ahead and adding "Task Complete!" when you reach the Kwik-E-Mart. It feels like it needs this.

The zombie car stage feels a bit awkward and sort of tacked on when I feel it would've made more sense for the player to be chased by the zombie while dropping off the supplies.It also doesn't help when playing the mission I rush when trying to beat the timer, so my car ended up being parked facing the Kwik-E-Mart. So I had to awkwardly turn around and it was mostly just a fight with the two of us circling each other. If the zombie is terrorizing town, I feel it should be following a set route rather than targeting Homer, or just be moved to a chase sequence.

The rest of the mission flowed really well however. The donut truck follow sequence was pretty intense.

L7BM1:

L7BM1 also ended up being pretty fun. Again, the concept of the original mission is taken and stretched out quite nicely. Each item is obtained in much more creative ways and no concept feels repeated. I feel I'm one of the few that enjoyed the original mission because I liked the concept of it taking place in such a small area with incredibly low timers, but the way it's executed here is also done pretty well. The only disorienting thing is that Smithers changes position after you retrieve each item. I suppose this was done to prevent backtracking, though it's something that was initially pretty confusing and might want to be worked out some. I appreciate that you dragged his car along with him just to keep the consistency.

As for the mission crashing when you try to assign the car as a Bonus Mission reward, have you looked into seeing if it has something to do with the vanilla rewards.mfk offering it as a Street Race reward somehow? You might also want to make sure it's marked properly as the "bonusmission" reward car, like so:

BindReward( " burns_v", "art\cars\burns_v.p3d", "car", "bonusmission", 7 );

The Street Races I'll make brief comments on that they weren't too bad. I figured these wouldn't be changed much just to match for consistency's sake with the rest of the Levels, but I guess having something different isn't too bad. You should change the con files for the bike race (the shadows are much bigger than what they should be) and look into adding the engine sounds for the clone bikes and Open Wheel Race Cars.

@Kenny Giles

Thank you so much for your feedback!

As far as the traffic goes, I'm torn between having the original traffic or my new traffic. I was actually thinking about what you wrote the other day when I was watching someone play the original, and the cheesyness of the traffic is something I sort of miss. However, I think that my traffic fits the atmosphere of the new terrain better than the old traffic (I find everything looks a bit more gray while the old version looked brown), and I also like that my traffic group has lots of larger vehicles to make navigating the streets much more challenging (the cola truck is almost like a brick wall!) What will most likely happen is I will allow the user to decide which traffic group to use in the mod settings, whether it's for a difficulty change or a preferred atmosphere.

I agree with what you wrote about the medication stage. The only reason I have it all in one stage is because I actually don't know how the 'interior' objective works. I'm either going to do what you suggested, or just make the medicine outside the Kwik-E-Mart, since going inside is kind of clunky anyway due to there not being any dialogue stages. I think I will make the objective with the zombie a 'losetail', especially because Radical never implemented that kind of objective in the game and it would be kind of weird to just start it in level 7.

I think I'll add 'drive to the gas station/grocery store' to the bonus mission since some players might just see the HUD icon and go back to the last location. Thanks for telling me.

The car I'm referring to for the bonus mission reward is actually 'smith_v' not 'burns_v' which is weird considering it's the vanilla bm7 reward. The game also doesn't crash when I play the mission, it crashes when I call the car.

I have no idea how to change shadows or add sounds, so some help on that would be much appreciated!

@max_power998 It's practically easy and simple to change the shadow of a car or adding in sounds. I'll make a quick tutorial on that right now for you (if you need pictures, I'll probably post them later on because I'm making this post from school, so not much i can do there mate lol)

First, there's two ways of changing shadows, but I highly recommend that you download Lucas' SH&R Car Shadow Adjuster from the SH&R mods page on this site. While you can adjust the shadows of vehicles without them, this provides a GUI that simply allows you to drag the coordinates of the shadow to where you want instead of typing them in in the .con file, which can prove really tedious because it's mostly trial and error based.

But anyway, Open up SH&R with the mod launcher and select what mod you're working with. In your case, Finale Spectacular. Then, with the Shadow Adjuster, open the .con file of the car which shadow you want to edit in your mod folder. As an example let's use hbike_v. Then in game, spawn your vehicle so you have a way of looking at it somehow to see what you're doing. Then in the shadow adjuster, simply drag the points and adjust the shadow so it looks right. Then you're done!

Now, adding sounds for vehicles is a bit more complicated, but it's simply just a process of editing the in-game car sound script, which is called car_tune.spt. You should be able to find it in scripts.rcf in the vanilla game folder. Then, in your mod folder, make some new folders so it goes like this: CustomFiles/sound/scripts and then place the car_tune in there. Then, open the file with Notepad++ and copy random set parameters for any vehicle, and place it at the bottom. Then replace the parameter name (e.g. famil_v) with the name of your custom car. If you want, you can change the engine and horn sounds at your own leisure.

Hope this helps! I'll try and update this later on to make things a bit more clearer if I can.

I played the mod a few days ago and here's what I think about it.

At first I thought that the idea of having different vehicles to the original ones in level 7 wouldn't work. However after playing the game I think that the New vehicles actually work well. Especially with this extended map as it makes it look less Halloweenish compared to the original level but it makes it look more serious. I actually prefer it to the old map and cars in the game. There are some issues that I have with the pedestrian cars such as homer not being shown inside of the phone car and no one in the cola trucks but that's the games fault not yours.

As for the two missions, I haven't been able to get past the donut truck because I'm finding it extremely difficult which would be okay if the mission wasn't that long or there was a timer on the donut truck instead of a distance meter. With the bonus mission, I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing after I give Smithers the tooth powder, but I like the Mission in general.

The idea of having new vehicles in the racing missions is a cool idea as well, but I got a bit confused sometimes as the barriers were gone and i kept taking shortcuts that avoided the checkpoints. again this is a map problem but I'm sure it can be easily fixed.

Overall I think that the mod is a great start and I think that many improvements that are made in the updates will perfect it.

@DerpyDosh
Thanks for the help! I'm taking a brief hiatus on the mod to work on another one but once I get back to it I will implement these things.

@MACCA
Thanks for your feedback! I'm glad you like the new cars. It is unfortunate that the traffic vehicles have no drivers but unless we figure out a way to put drivers in the traffic vehicles than it will stay that way for a while (I may end up just putting fake drivers in them like the other traffic)

I will make the donut chase easier as you haven't been the first one to complain about it. I have a 100 follow distance on it, while most chases have a 150-200 follow distance, making it extremely tough. I will likely increase the follow distance on it or decrease the amount of traffic that can appear in that stage.

The last item of BM1 (the record) is left intentionally vague, as I wanted it to be sort of a challenge. Think about what the stage message says and you'll find it.

Regarding the street races, I don't think I'll be able to put the props back in until I get access to the map editor. When that happens I will be changing other parts of the map as well (such as reopening the cemetery shortcut and making the church burnt down again)

Traffic cars should only have fake drivers. And the con files for the traffic cars should not call SetDriver (the game will then default to an invisible phantom driver).

The reasoning for this is that all the traffic cars are created at the start of the level and teleported around the level. So if you were to place actual drivers and then destroy one of the cars it would cause that car to no longer have a driver until the level is completely reloaded (since they jump out). Radical modeled fake drivers into the traffic cars to work around the way they designed their traffic system.

You probably want to make a copy of each of the cars for your dystopian traffic group and then copy in one of the fake drivers from one of radical's cars. You can make a new skeleton joint in the cars skeleton, attach the mesh to that in the composite drawable, and then move it around by changing the position of the joint to get it positioned correctly.

Also, If you wanted to you could also make the car colors change randomly like Radical's traffic to make it a bit more interesting. I can elaborate more on how to do that if you'd like.

And of course you'd need to add the new traffic versions of the cars to car_tune.spt and copy the con files excluding the SetDriver line in them. Also maybe make it so the traffic cell phone car doesn't have the absolutely obnoxious ringing sound (I get what Radical was doing with that but dang is it bothersome).

And lastly, yeah those things will require the map builder.

@Loren Goodwin

Alright, I'll see if I can have my friend help me with the fake drivers. I also never noticed that the traffic cars changed color. I assume it works similarly to the way you guys make your cars change color, but I have no idea how any of this works.

No recolourable traffic is entirely different. Look at some of the base games traffic like the generic sedans and you'll notice them change color.