Hard Drivin' II, mind blown

[dukeofurl]

This might technically belong in a different subforum, but what the heck, I'll put it here since this is the most active subforum.

I was checking out Hard Drivin' II, the dos port, which as you might expect, is derived from the Hard Drivin' arcade game. I knew there were dos ports of Hard Drivin' and Race Drivin', but what I didn't know is that...... Hard Drivin' II has a full featured track editor with dozens of tracks/objects that can be placed on the terrain, akin to the Stunts track editor.

Stunts does many things better than this game (better framerate, better draw distance, more cars, hills/water in terrain), but HD2 does some things Stunts does not, such as greater variety in the radius of the turn tracks you can place.

I haven't exhaustively tried out HD2's editor, but what gives? Unlike Stunts, there is no indication of any HD2 community or custom levels ever being uploaded anywhere.

I suppose the same could be said about Stunt pipsqueak, another dos pipsqueak with the ability to make custom stunt tracks... but at least in HD2's case, I would have thought this game was somewhat popular through the relationship to the highly popular and well known arcade game...

Anyone else tried HD2's editor, or made custom tracks in it?

[dreadnaut]

"More active subforums" is not really a thing: there's only one forum, and you can see all new stuff in all sections from the 'Unread' page. I'll move it to the "Racing games" section for you

That said, I've never tried the game! The slow framerate makes it look more dated, but the non-grid editor looks interesting. I wonder if it ends up being more complex to use than Stunts' own though🤔

[alanrotoi]

Does hard drivin 2 exist??

[Duplode]

Yup, it does! Going by the descriptions (not really familiar with it either) it seems the difference between I and II is (track editor aside!) more akin to that between Stunts 1.0 and 1.1, as opposed to a full-blown sequel. By the way, @CYBERYOGI -CO-Windler posted several interesting threads about Hard Driving and other games a while ago, like this one.

[dukeofurl]

Does hard drivin 2 exist??

Yes, but not as the smooth arcade game everyone loves (the sequel to that in the arcades was Race Drivin').  In between arcade release of Hard Drivin' and Race Drivin', Domark puts out "Hard Drivin' II" for Dos (and maybe Amiga and AtariST).  Performance is OK for a dos game of 1991, but compared to stunts or Hard Drivin' arcade, it is worse graphics.  It has the one track that existed in Hard Drivin', plus 3 or 4 new tracks that are only seen in this game, which are not the same as the added tracks in Race Drivin'.  In addition, it has the track editor, which allows you to create your own tracks using the hard drivin' pieces, including loops and jumps and the other stunt pieces that exist in the Hard Drivin' track.

I found an old reference to someone using the HD2 track editor. Supposedly you may need to add "checkpoints" to your track in order for the editor to allow you to play it.

[Cas]

I got Hard Drivin' II the same day I got Stunts. I had seen the original Hard Drivin' on arcade at least once before that, but yes, HD2 felt more dated, more primitive in its capabilities than Stunts. To try to have more "colours", it uses colour composition by interlacing pixels of different true colours. Not sure if to call this "dithering". In 320x200, the pixels are too big for this to look good. But the graphics engine is more robust and you won't see through walls. Triangles are always correcly sorted, as I remember.

You don't get that feeling of speed you get with Stunts. On the other hand, there are other cars on the road... not racing, but moving around, like in Test Drive. You do find stunts similar to what you get in Stunts, which made me feel that Stunts as actually a related game.

You can only have so many saved tracks at the same time, each in one slot with a letter to identify it. Tracks are sequential, so you place a track element after another and you can arbitrarily choose the angle between them. It's an interesting idea, but you can get richer combinations with Stunts. The grid may appear as a limitation, but Stunts is an open-world game thanks to it. Well, open... within 30x30 tiles. It'd be good if tiles were half the size by side. It'd allow for much more interaction. In HD2, you can place roads very close to one another, but I don't remember if it's actually possible to get them to cross.

[dukeofurl]

Could you get around the track save limit by dragging some saved tracks out of the directory, and then saving some new ones, and then swapping stuff in and out when you wanted to use it?  Super clunky compared to scrolling through dozens of tracks in Stunts, but at least you could share tracks with others and also maintain more than 3-5 tracks then, right?

[Cas]

Uhm.... I don't remember that. I would have to test it. It's been for sure over a decade at the very least since I've last run Hard Drivin' II