Need for Speed Underground

From NFSUnlimited.net Need for Speed Wiki
Revision as of 06:47, 18 May 2008 by Bojan (Talk | contribs)
Jump to: navigation, search
Need for Speed Underground Box Art

Contents

Quick Links


Overview

Need for Speed: Underground (NFSU) is a racing game, developed and published by Electronic Arts in 2003. It is part of the Need for Speed computer and video game series. It was created at the EA Black Box studios, located in Vancouver, BC.

Its premise (highly tuned, customised cars participating in illegal street races) was likely inspired by the Import Scene and the movies The Fast and the Furious and 2 Fast 2 Furious.

A complete reimagining of the series' formula, NFSU offered a career mode featuring a storyline, and a garage mode that allowed players to fully customize their cars with a large variety of brand-name performance and visual upgrades. All races take place in a city at night. Instead of hundred-thousand dollar exotics, Underground featured vehicles associated with the Import Scene. This, plus the increasingly arcade-like controls, became points of controversy for Need for Speed fans. Despite this, Underground was commercially very successful, and inspired a sequel.

It is rumoured that the car manufacturers were very strict in how their vehicles were to be portrayed in this game, especially considering the "illegal street racing" reputation of the tuner culture. EA took some effort in making the races appear as sanctioned racing events, and included a public service announcement in the game's introduction. In addition, vehicles do not have damage models.

Racing Modes

Circuit

Circuit is a standard race that involves racing with up to four opponents cars around a loop track for two laps or more, and is the main mode of the game.

A variant of Circuit is Knockout, which, similar to previous Need for Speed titles, involves "knocking out" the last racer who passes the starting line in each lap until the final leader of the race remains, and wins the race. In the case of Underground, Knockout sessions have a maximum of three laps for four racers.


Sprint

Sprint mode is a variation on the Circuit mode, where the contestants race in a point-to-point track instead of loop tracks. These races are typically shorter than "circuits" (with a maximum of 8 km in length), so players are required to be more cautious of any mistakes during racing.


Drift

Drifting is one of the most challenging and technical aspects of the game. Drift mode consists of one player in a short loop track, where the objective is to collect as many points as possible by drifting along the track. The player competes with three other contestants, who appear to accumulate scores along with the player during the drift session. The player would be required to beat these scores in order to obtain top positions.

Bonuses are awarded for players who drift in the other borders of the track, drift vertically, or perform chained-drifting (continuous drifting by constantly steering the vehicle during drifts to maintain speed); if the player succeeds in ending a drift without collisions onto the sides of the track, the collected points are added into the score, otherwise, the collected points are cancelled.

Drift mode is the only type of racing where time taken to complete the track does not matter, since players are given the freedom to complete the allocated number laps at their own pace. This may explain the absence of nitrous oxide in this mode, since it serves no suitable purpose in this situation.


Drag Racing

Drag racing is the second most technical form of race in the game. It involves racing against three cars on typically straight tracks, and attempting to obtain top positions to win. In order to master Drag mode, players must employ good timing and reflexes for gear shifting, redlining, overtaking, and the use of nitrous oxide boosts; the mode places particular emphasis in monitoring the tachometer during races, which is enlarged and situated on the leftmost portion of the screen. Steering in this mode is simplified to simply allow for lane changes, while the computer handles the steering along the lanes, and the player focuses more on maintaining an optimum speed for the car.

Two conditions will result to players being forfeited during a drag race: head-on collisions with a vehicle (traffic or opponent), barrier or divider>; or blown engines as a result from prolonged redlining and the subsequent overheating of the engine.



Soundtrack Listing

  • Overseer - Doomsday (3:13)
  • The Crystal Method - Born Too Slow (2:45)
  • Rancid - Out of Control (1:39)
  • Rob Zombie - Two-Lane Blacktop (2:54)
  • BT - Kimosabe (4:55)
  • Static-X - The Only (2:51)
  • Element Eighty - Broken Promises (3:16)
  • Asian Dub Foundation - Fortress Europe (3:51)
  • Hotwire - Invisible (2:52)
  • Story of the Year - And the Hero Will Drown (3:12)
  • Andy Hunter - The Wonders of You (7:09)
  • Junkie XL - Action Radius (3:54)
  • Fuel - Quarter (3:39)
  • Jerk - Sucked In (2:52)
  • Fluke - Snapshot (3:59)
  • lostprophets - Ride (3:40)
  • Overseer - Supermoves (4:46)
  • FC Kahuna - Glitterball (5:43)
  • Blindside - Swallow (2:24)
  • Lil Jon & the Eastside Boyz - Get Low (4:25)
  • Mystikal - Smashing the Gas (Get Faster) (3:09)
  • Dilated Peoples - Who's Who (3:55)
  • Nate Dogg - Keep It Coming (4:18)
  • X-ecutioners - Body Rock (3:36)
  • Petey Pablo - Need For Speed (3:32)
  • T.I. - 24's (4:06)

Editing

There is a posibility to edit the game in a couple of ways. The most popular one is vinyl editing. You can create your own vinyls using Photoshop or another image editor, and import them into the game. Another editing aspect is track editing. Unfortunately you can't import new tracks. It is only possible to change the skybox textures of the track and the textures of the menu's car park garage.. And the third thing you can edit is neon editing... You can edit neons by changing the shape of light (yuo can write some words on the ground under your car, and the colour (original neons are in one colour, but you can make it in two or more colours. The last thing you can edit is gauge; all you can do is change the colour of light.

So now abuot how to do this:

1. Programs needed:

You will need the BinTex which you will get here:(http://www.edgefiles.com/files/11397.html) and a graphics editing program that has support for DDS files (Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro). For further infor how to get dds editing work in Photoshop visit this website: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nv_texture_tools.html Make sure you download and install the Photoshop DDS plugin AND the required DLLs. 2. Exporting vinyls Launch BinTex, open the VINYLS.BIN file from NFS Underground/Cars/ "Car of your choice" folder. First sort by name, then export the vinyl you want to edit. You MUST export both vinyl and vinyl_mask file. 3. Editing When opening a dds file make sure you open without displaying mipmaps. You will have to edit both dds files, the vinyl and the mask. The mask is always 2 colored, black background and some white area. The black area appears transparent on the car, whereas the white area will be used by the vinyl. In case of one colored and manufacturer vinyls, the mask and the vinyl must be the same. There are various techniques available in editing vinyls, depends on the program you use. You must be careful only about this: Only use the colors that were in the dds file before you edited it. If you use any other colors, the game will crash when you load the vinyl. When you finish editing, save it back to dds using ARGB 8bit pallete. 4. Importing back to the game Go to BinTex again, select the vinyl you exported before, click on Texutres - Import. Do the same for mask vinyl. Then click on save. The vinyl should be ready in the game. Note that the names of vinyls are not the same as in game. So be sure to check all vinyls in the game from the group you edited. If you experience a crash of the game when you select your vinyl in game, go back to step 3 and try to fix the dds images. 5. Most frequent issues

  • BinTex gives you the following error: "An error occured while trying to decompress texture data"

The jdlzdll.dll should be in the same dir as bintex.exe (they were both in the zip file).

  • BinTex gives you the following error when importing a dds file: "Texture format has an error!".

You must save the dds as ARGB 8bit. There is little info about importing and use of edited vinyls in this thread: http://forum.nfsunlimited.net/viewtopic.php?t=1139

Personal tools
Namespaces
Variants
Actions
NFSUnlimited
Need for Speed Wiki
NFSUnlimited.net Wiki
Toolbox