The Simpsons: Hit & Run - The Definitive Edition' Announcement Post

Those who have been active in the Donut Team Discord (or the Woah, Radical! discord) will have most likely seen random snippets of different Work in Progress things from me, and two other guys (Toastee & Starfrost) over the past couple weeks.

I'm now happy to note that the project is in a state where we believe we can open up about the development and post an invite for those who feel they may be able to join and contribute.

The following sections will be narrated by me, programmer Starfrost and programmer/musician Toastee.


For this remake, our goals are simple:

• Recreating the authentic SHAR atmosphere of bustling levels, filled with NPCs, gags, events, collector cards etc.
  
• Completely reworking the art from the ground up, from currently re-using old assets as placeholders, we hope to use newly made HD art to complete the look and feel of a SHAR remake 18 years on.
  
• Working with existing resources to look at creative decisions and find the best way to implement the true original vision of the game without sacrificing the end product.
  
• Retaining the arcade style of platforming and driving, with slight touch-ups to best suit the new game engine.
  
• Re-using the original vehicle data to provide an as close to original feel for vehicles.
  

Now to the important stuff....demonstrating what's been done in the span of just a few weeks.


In several weeks, we have ported Level 1's base map completely, and have additionally completed the base map for Level 2.
This includes creating new shaders to take advantage of specific parts of models such as vertex colors, to replicate the look of the levels in Unity in an authentic manner when compared to the original game.

Here's a peek at l2z1 and l2r1 currently in:


The original music within The Simpsons: Hit & Run is compressed, and the best quality we have available is 24kHz.

As a result of this, I personally (along with Toastee) have been working on revamping the soundtrack (you may see some snippets in a future blog post from Laurem). Our end goal is to produce a soundtrack that feels authentic to the original SHAR OST, by including the following:

• Original Uncompressed Tracks from the SHAR OST (when and if found)
  
• Collaboration with fellow composers and musicians (we are always looking for people that can live record their instruments! Got a saxophone? Hit me up!)
  
• Complete remake of Allan Levy's tracks, with Jeff Tymoschuk and Marc Baril's tracks featuring original samples and libraries that were used in SHAR's OST as they are found.

So far, the tracks Dr. Nick, Social Club, Bart Chase 2 and Bart Chase 4 have been completed (though, the former may be reworked). Works in progress are:

• Sunday Drive
  
• Hit & Run!
  
• Bollywood 1 (Incriminating Caffeine)

Toastee:
Utilising the original SHAR mission files we've created a new mission loader system to work within the Unity Engine:

• All original character interactions, mission cut scenes, and mission preview images.
  
• Remaining true to the original (At least this far into development), all missions will retain their original structure, and the various forms of the 3 main mission types.
  
• For further mod support, the planned functionality is to allow custom missions to load as well down the line.

Starfrost:
The mission system is called MFK2, based off of SHAR's original MFK with minor improvements made for code clarity and support for the Unity engine. Most of the commands are identical to MFK, but those that concern the Pure3D engine (such as LoadP3DFile) will be removed and changed. Furthermore, we have implemented braces into the scripting language to make it more clear what the exact scope of what you are working on is.

An example:

AddStage(0)
{
  AddObjective("destroy")
  {
    // do whatever
  }
}

For modding purposes, there will be an MFK to MFK2 converter tool.



In the past 2 weeks the vehicle system has seen 3 major revisions:

• Version 1 utilised the unity wheel collider system, after initial testing it was soon clear that the aged system was not going to even be capable of producing similar performance to that expected by SHAR fans
  
• Version 2 instead went for 2 scripts interacting with each other between the independent wheels and the main vehicle controller, this resulted in certain functions simply not occurring properly during run-time execution
  
• Version 3, our current iteration, runs off Unity Raycasts to provide accurate data to a single vehicle controller, this controller is also planned to take in the original SHAR vehicle CON files for handling.

The most recent version is the one we'll be using to develop further, integrating things from Engine pitch modulation, artificial anti-roll bars, to the damage model and overall feeling of SHAR.



There was a lot to go over in this post, and of course there'll be far more for us to talk about in future...especially once we get a proper name for this particular project! I hope you are interested by the concept, and if you are interested in joining the team to contribute in any way, you can find me here or on Discord!

This looks promising. Great work so far!

The quoted post is unavailable.

Thank you! It's come fairly far in just a few weeks, so I'm really happy with the amount of work that's been done.