Glitchriding the Fahr-Simulator 2009 (German driving simulator stunt tricks)

[CYBERYOGI -CO-Windler]

Fahr-Simulator 2009 by Astragon is a German driving simulator game for PC.

Normal gameplay is quite boring (drive from A to B in time, avoid penalty points of traffic rule violation), but full of ridiculous glitches those permit much more challenging crazy stunts and offroad trial tricks. So I made many youtube videos about glitchriding it. They were artistically edited (movie style) and not yet another boring "let's play".

Glitchriding the Fahr-Simulator 2009 - Intro Movie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J3GE-4RF6o

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whole playlist
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCMrVbN84CCZjayaEwCMFhShFNvOZOgRk

On first glimpse this 3D open world with unbreakable cars is fully enclosed by safety fences and so less inspiring than Hard Drivin, and it not even tries to be an arcade game (no death, no racing for highscores). But if you use driving skills to escape the matrix, it gets really weird. Namely in the rough outside terrain mind boggling things happen. Many spots are difficult to pass, full of unexpected traps and perils lurking underneath, making your car get stuck, propel into the air or suddenly plummet into void by tipping over the edge of nowhere.

After a fall or getting stuck far offroad by glitchride, you can not get back. There are no savestates. A key press only drops you onto the nearest legal road position, which can take a very long detour to the slipthrough passage that brought you offroad. This makes exploration of distant areas challenging, and some may be only reached by a strategic vehicle collision that randomly slings your car over a barrier. So despite this is no early classic, it is as glitchy and bizarre enough to get interesting.

Fahr-Simulator 2009 glitchride: asphalt dive through highway bridge
https://youtu.be/OYvMPLmXuDI

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Driving simulators seem to be a more locally made product than most game software. So this one depicts the cliché of a German small town from about year 2000 with the typical urban furniture, including yellow phone booths, Autobahn SOS telephones, traffic circles, billboards with ad parodies, bus stops with ticket machine and even those iconic little wall mounted gumball machines - like a virtual time capsule conserved on a sunny day. There is some subtle humor in this sim; so a courier service sign "SPEED TRACK" and the way the car comes down at restart hint to Hard Drivin, and the red race track sign "STEINBURG RING" alludes to a famous ancestor. But devoided of human beings, the surreal ghost town cityscape soon turns scary.

Fahr-Simulator 2009 glitchride: crash race to city
https://youtu.be/FtCpEiJZ5gY

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Some objects are drawn simpler than others. It would not surprise me if they reused old graphics from serious training simulators (it even comes with scenery editor). But beside lamps (those don't emit light) and horn it lacks many basic functions of a car, dashboards are too poorly animated (e.g. blinker pilot lamps look darker without sun, image in mirrors don't rotate with car, sticks don't move) and drone car AI behaves way too stupid for realistic training, i.e. random collisions among indestructible tumbling traffic (no visible drivers, no bikes) feel like being trapped inside a box of shiny toy cars when dense traffic is enabled. (I thus turned it off in most videos.) The motor sound is 3D but sometimes fails, and complete lack of tyre noise prevents audible feedback of traction. (At least you can honk.) Driving faster (over 120km/h with SUV) tilts your car rather like a motorcycle and soon turns almost unsteerable, so I wonder where the physics model came from.

Fahr-Simulator 2009 was sold on CD in German language only. Possibly it derived from a driving school or lab PC setup with students permission to only install locally, because (unlike normal Windows games) it installs in a rather unusual location:
"/Users/USERNAME/AppData/Roaming/astragon Software GmbH/Fahr-Simulator 2009" To run on modern PCs with Win10, you need to download the patch "Fahr-Simulator_Upgrade_1.2_Setup.exe", else on Ryzen 2400G I got a black screen when enabling shadows. This also adds a race track and more cars (one with editable textures?). The game employs PhysX 8 and is incompatible with 9 (refused to start when I installed PhysX 9.21.0713), so it may make trouble if newer games depend on it.


The CD cover of this game proudly boasted "with modding capabilities", but the so-called level editor (see directory "Scenery Editor") is useless for gamers (even worse than that of "Hard Drivin II"), since it seems to only define routes of drone cars and traffic rules etc. for drive training, but is unsuited to build own tracks or new graphics. The manual "Anleitung Modding.pdf" also mentions to edit cars, but this all seems to need other software. Apparently code is programmed in Lua. The best the editor can do is watching details of the map in top or side view, but zooming out turns it very slow and eventually crashes (map window stays empty). To make it run, backup the original level "scenes/Mittstedt und Umgebung.sce", copy that file to your home folder "/Documents/astragon Software GmbH/Fahr-Simulator 2009/scenarios/test/" and (very important) make it writeable. Watch out not to overwrite the original file, which should stay write protected. A simple overview map is "Karte.pdf" and a detail section of the virtual town "Karte Stadt.pdf", but both lack the race track, which came later by upgrade 1.2.

Fahr-Simulator 2009 map
https://youtu.be/SE7SBMSBVKM

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Youtube badly spoils moving grass details (despite encoding VGA as 720p turns slightly sharper). Also the default Win10 game recorder Gamebar often saved unrecognizable pixel mess; the fullscreen fast zooming grass texture from this game seems to be the arch-enemy of all codecs. So on Ryzen 2400G I had to install unofficial graphics drivers (WHQL AMD Software Hybrid Edition) to unlock the (hardware based?) screen recorder ReLive. But even there for 30 fps VGA resolution I need to select disk space eating 12 mbps in H264, while the allegedly better compressing H265 codec drowns in awful blurred garbage unless I set data rate much higher. With the video editor Shotcut I could reduce data rate of the finished videos to still hefty 4 mbps (roughly like DVD) with the default codec (libx264?=H264, using average (ABR) with dual pass, interpolation=bicubic, preset=medium, audio aac 32 kbps). This encodes slow, but faster modes make garbage. ReLive records 4:3 videos in 854*480 instead of 640*480, so in Shotcut I have to add to the track a zoom filter (save it with position -107 -94, size 854*668, zoom 133.4%) for proper 4:3 without ugly black frame. But this gets ignored in clips with cross-dissolve, so I need to manually add this filter to each of them. It is crucial to always choose the final (biggest intended) resolution before you decide to cut a film, because changing it later will completely mess up all filter coordinates (text positions, zoom etc.).

test video
https://youtu.be/AATJDcK2_Pk

The default Win10 game recorder Gamebar often saved unrecognizable pixel mess; the fullscreen fast zooming grass texture from this game seems to be the arch-enemy of all codecs. So on Ryzen 2400G I had to install unofficial graphics drivers (WHQL AMD Software Hybrid Edition) to unlock the (hardware based?) screen recorder ReLive. But even there for 30 fps VGA resolution I need to select disk space eating 12 mbps in H264, while the allegedly better compressing H265 codec drowns in awful blurred garbage unless I set data rate much higher.

With the video editor Shotcut I could reduce data rate of the finished videos to still hefty 4 mbps (roughly like DVD) with the default codec (libx264?=H264, using average (ABR) with dual pass, interpolation=bicubic, preset=medium, audio aac 32 kbps). This encodes slow, but faster modes make garbage. ReLive records 4:3 videos in 854*480 instead of 640*480, so in Shotcut I have to add to the track a zoom filter (save it with position -107 -94, size 854*668, zoom 133.4%) for proper 4:3 without ugly black frame. But this gets ignored in clips with cross-dissolve, so I need to manually add this filter to each of them. It is crucial to always choose the final (biggest intended) resolution before you decide to cut a film, because changing it later will completely mess up all filter coordinates (text positions, zoom etc.).

[CYBERYOGI -CO-Windler]

I made several glitchriding videos of it, showing stunt tricks and how to explore hidden places. They are like a playthrough beside there is no predefined goal for speedrun. Some are longer (but well cut) and of course you can skip, but then you may miss some message texts.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCMrVbN84CCZjayaEwCMFhShFNvOZOgRk

particularly recommended:

• Fahr-Simulator 2009 glitchride: asphalt dive through highway bridge
• Fahr-Simulator 2009 glitchride: outlook mountain tour
• Fahr-Simulator 2009 glitchride: train bridges tour
• Fahr-Simulator 2009 glitchride: Visiting the Chapel of Void
• Fahr-Simulator 2009 glitchride: crash race to city
• Fahr-Simulator 2009 glitchride: Exploring the mystery heart of the city (trial parcours)

others:

• Fahr-Simulator 2009: car types & colours
• Fahr-Simulator 2009: map
• Fahr-Simulator 2009: map
• Fahr-Simulator 2009 glitchride: jump backwards into backyards (tips)
• Fahr-Simulator 2009 glitchride: prop village to highway mountains tour
• Fahr-Simulator 2009 glitchride: train station & mountains tour
• Fahr-Simulator 2009 glitchride: train bridge to highway mountains tour
• Fahr-Simulator 2009 glitchride: prop village to highway mountains tour
• Fahr-Simulator 2009 glitchride: offroad exploring village Wiesdorf
• Fahr-Simulator 2009 glitchride: offroad back to supermarket (rail end)
• Fahr-Simulator 2009 glitchride: strange motor sound bug

video descriptions

Glitchriding the Fahr-Simulator 2009 - Intro Movie
https://youtu.be/7J3GE-4RF6o

"During 1st corona lockdown I fell asleep inside my car. I awoke in an unknown place, and all people had vanished. - It was sunny without a sun, and felt funny but not fun. Signs looked German but time stood still. - And nothing was like it seemed to be..."

I created this little intro movie for the game, adding an (originally missing) sci-fi/fantasy background story about its city. (It was also somewhat a video cut exercise to learn Shortcut. Sounds employ Casio SA-21.)

asphalt dive through highway bridge
https://youtu.be/OYvMPLmXuDI

Did your car ever sink into liquid concrete? And can it improve karma to help the flock of black cars? On this wicked autobahn bridge you can dive up through the driving surface and see cars rumble over you or crash right through the deck.

outlook mountain tour
https://youtu.be/qJBZUCUfdhE

See how to escape the fenced roads to begin a long offroad trip into the mountains,  sightseeing a spectacular panorama view of the city and explore the outside of the race track.

(Sorry for the terrible picture quality. Youtube seems to garble the moving grass texture despite I saved this in 720p. The original video (4Mbps rate, H264 at high quality) looks much clearer.)

train bridges tour
https://youtu.be/h7hLFfdk_8g

Train bridges are not what they look like. This long offroad tour along dangerous cliffs follows train rails back to town, finding the city abyss and another secret passage to jump to the court of a tower block.

Visiting the Chapel of Void
https://youtu.be/dPWjehHKgpY

They say, Germans worship their Heilig's Blechle. But what was the sinister mystery behind this church? See how exploring the chapel by car ended with divine visitation.

crash race to city
https://youtu.be/FtCpEiJZ5gY

Driving a sports car out of the race track back to town, resulting in absurd collisions with big piles of tumbling cars, and finding the place to rid your driving license.

Although this game was sold as driving simulator, drone car AI moves way too stupid for realistic training, because random collisions among indestructible tumbling opponent cars (no visible drivers, no bikes) feel like being trapped inside a box of shiny toy cars.

Exploring the mystery heart of the city (trial parcours)
https://youtu.be/yV1Q4XIdXnQ

After endless explorations I finally found the passage to the perilous urban core. Was here the origin why all the people had disappeared?! After the mind altering experience I followed the rails offroad back to town.

car types & colours
https://youtu.be/zOT0iU2mSVM

See the various cars and menu options of this game. Switching to another car sometimes mutes motor and horn sound in strange ways. Restart game to fix this.

map
https://youtu.be/SE7SBMSBVKM

a quick look at the road map of this game. The highway surrounds the town Mittstedt in a big loop with a complicated network of interchanges. The straight diagonal line is the train rail. The last 2 screenshots are from the scenery editor (which is difficult to run) and includes the race track (lower middle part). Green areas are abyss. The default map in the install folder is "Karte.pdf" and a detail section of its virtual town "Karte Stadt.pdf". Screenshot 3 is village Wiesdorf.

To run the Scenery Editor, backup the original level "scenes/Mittstedt und Umgebung.sce", copy that file to your home folder "/Documents/astragon Software GmbH/Fahr-Simulator 2009/scenarios/test/" and (very important) make it writeable. Usage is explained in "Anleitung Modding.pdf", but zooming out turns it very slow and eventually crashes (map window stays empty).

jump backwards into backyards
https://youtu.be/UBVC0Q2zxqQ

This shows how to override pillar barriers, what risks to expect and how to do trial exercises at the edge of the abyss. One of the backyard roads is fully functional despite it got blocked.

train station & mountains tour
https://youtu.be/6lEGRqEoo7I

the offroad risks on steep mountains at bridges and train station, but beware, the rails are lava! Only a compact car fits through this narrow slipthrough passage to the deadly area by the train track.

train bridge to highway mountains tour
https://youtu.be/lMs4Xkm3o50

Offroad trip from train bridge to the highway mountain, performing trial exercises at the cliff of the most deadly rock wall. (This is the shorter route, to its other side only.)

prop village to highway mountains tour
https://youtu.be/oOaMM05z1EY

An offroad trip to a distant village by the highway results in a shocking discovery. After having no burger at the diner, I try an expedition to the deadly highway mountains (taking the longer route).

offroad exploring village Wiesdorf
https://youtu.be/CUV2JTGOvOo

A jump over the rail after train bridge brings you offroad to Wiesdorf. This small village seems to be the oldest area of the sim; it is poorly drawn and invisible barriers behave different than the rest.

offroad back to supermarket (rail end)
https://youtu.be/mqDj_HdW5_E

An offroad trip shows why it seems hopeless to wait for the train in this hick town.

strange motor sound bug
https://youtu.be/T4ASProWxKE

A jump over this safety fence with road sign garbled motor sound in funny ways. The sound is generally quite buggy, so switching to another car sometimes mutes motor and horn or causes crackling distortion. Restart game to fix this.

[Cas]

Very funny glitches!  I guess no matter how complex an engine is, there will always be some strange behaviour

[CYBERYOGI -CO-Windler]

Fahr-Simulator 2012

I now also bought the DVD of the successor "Fahr-Simulator 2012". Main difference is more different vehicles, those get enabled only by certain missions, and daylight changes with time, but it is still similarly glitchy. Most annoying are still the absent blinker pilot lamps, and that (despite late evening driving) lamps emit no light.

Both games apparently indeed had international release in English, named "Driving Simulator 2009" and "Driving Simulator 2012".

While 2009 did not really know if it wants to be a teaching tool or game, 2012 is more clearly positioned as a game, so it has no (useless) editor anymore and installs to a more usual directory path. It has 3 cities but unfortunately comes with no map, but it displays the near environment in a kind of satnav and (most important) is that one of the outside camera views can now not only pan by mouse, but by scroll wheel can slowly zoom in-/out into pointing direction, so you can basically slowly fly around everywhere to get e.g. bird's eye view of everything (seeing all the missing roofs and other prop junk in full glory, which somewhat spoils the mystery) and even zoom around inside your car (cockpit details etc., e.g. pedals are missing). The abyss here is not grass grid texture anymore but plain black. There are even pedestrians, those however seem ghosts those you can drive through without damage, and sometimes they walk right through your car and so (like all other immaterial prop glitch mess) move in 3D through its interior.

2012 loads very slowly (because it pre-renders the varying light conditions?) and outside view can get jerky at too high effect (e.g. reflection) settings. And unfortunately viewing distance (which is fairly low) can not be set by hand anymore. Instead it has a strange "dynamic colour"(?) setting to make sunlight glare more spectacular, but it behaves rather like a too slow automatic white balance of a digicam. Unfortunately the editor of 2009 fails to load the .sce files of 2012, so it can not be used to render its road map (but camera top view somewhat compensates this).

I read that also a version 2013 exists, which only difference seems additional driving school training (with questionnaire and practice), which practice mode is barely useful because drone cars drive so bad that they spontaneously collide with you and so make it impossible to pass the tests.


3D-Fahrschule

Another unintentionally funny German driving simulator is "3D-Fahrschule" (aka "3D-Driving-School"), which clearly focuses on being a teaching aid, so while it models realistic traffic rules and tests, the graphics looks like the first RidgeRacer, only in bad (i.e. technical standard of 1992). I.e. house facades are wallpapered with short repeating textures those often lack doors or have truncated nonsense shop text fragments.

http://www.3dfahrschule.de/

Apparently this came out in 2001, and from that day on got only subtle updates to run on modern Windows (e.g. current version supports new steering wheels). On its website is a new free version 6 that has 4 levels (enough to drive around). An older shareware version 5 (drive5-DE.exe) had all levels but limits count of program starts (can be tricked by a sandbox) that on my Ryzen 2400G works only in windowed mode (else environment becomes a grey silhouette). Cars here do have realistic features (turn lights, wipers, headlights emit light), but driving physics acts like an 8-bit game, i.e. collisions immediately stop the car (with drumkit sound) and it barely bounces over obstacles. And why here in outside view of all the player's car (unlike FahrSim2009/2012) has no transparent windows makes no sense. I watched on youtube that there are some glitchride tricks where in few spots cars can jump over mountains into the void.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_DskpSOvdI

Sometimes opponents partially drive through each others without collision or disappear/reappear in certain spots, which seems acceptable for a teaching aid that mainly intends to provide controlled preprogrammed situations. In the (oldest) 2001 version pedestrians were ridiculous absurd muscle guys those look and move like helium filled dummies on strings escaped from a closed traffic training area.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd9QMzEaTxE&list=PLrUboM5KU5qsKSaqnGbIk2JGjozCkY-JZ