Behind the scenes
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This behind the scenes is written for people who want to know more stuff about the mod. We will cover the creation and the making of this mod. Enjoy!

Note: this is the development of the 1st version.

[Parts]:
1)- Creation of this mod
2)- Behind the scenes
        1- Beginning
        2- Grip mode and improvements
        3- Drift mode
        4- Speed challenge        
        5- Ending

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1- [Creation of this mod]

I have a love hate relationship with NFS ProStreet. It has a big potential but EA ruined it with horrible development times. And one of the worst things about this game is it's handling. It's too awkward and sluggish, and sometimes buggy.

I completed the game without any mods at the first time around. Grip and drift races were mostly tolarable, especially with a car like Impreza. But sluggish handling was really hampered the experience at speed challenge races.

I tried handling mods at my other playthroughs, it was better than vanilla, but they were not quite the thing i wanted. It didn't fixed many glaring problems with the handling. But I really admire the effort to fix this great game.

Also one of the reasons contributed to the creation of this mod is that the other mods were too hard to modify. I wanted something that i can modify and make adjustments pretty easily. And can be easily read by a human.

So after finishing my graphics mods for the DIRT (2007) and GRID (2008), I decided to work on the ProStreet handling overhaul around the 8-9th April of 2025. Since I knew how to use VltEd, and it has similar to the workflow i had with the other mods i made. I decided to give a shot.

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2- [Behind the scenes]


1) ----Beginning----


I started with creating a base handling with one car. First i used Toyota Corolla, but then switched to the Mazda RX-8. The base grip mode handling got created first. At the 11th of March 2025, it was good enough to share it on Discord as a early test version. Test version included 7 cars i choose, it lacked the drift and speed challenge modes.

After that, i created the base drift and speed challenge handling. This mod consists of the handling base and modifications. Base just changes the base handling characteristics, modifications are added on top of it to make driving better.

Then after i created a solid base, i added every car to the mod. I need to mention that i couldn't do something like this without the text editor i used. Because the VltEd's ui is really sluggish for quick and mass modifications.

I mainly used my text editor Xed while making this mod. It really made my life easier while i was developing this mod. One of the upsides of "text editor first" approach is, that you can organize it at your will. I really tried to keep the scripts of this mod easy to read and modify. So changes and additions can be done quickly and easily. 

Also i can use the power of the text editor to make my progress faster. For example since all of the values shared a common ground, i can just change "rx8_driftlow" to "delta_highendscgrip" easily at mass.

But as you can imagine, mass changing names and values doesn't cut it. Since there are many cars with no drift values, or cars with weird anomalies. I needed to manually remove drift lines from non drift cars. And some cars were oddly made, like Corvette C6 and Porsche Cayman S has different main folder names compared to their actual value names.

Car values are mostly in order like this: driftlow, drifthigh, track, track_highend and highendscgrip. But some of the cars don't follow this standard and use weird names like highend, highendsc and drift, even slotcar for 911 Turbo or even just codes like this 0x6e5b8588. But these are rare exceptions, and codes are mostly used at drag cars which i don't plan to rework for obvious reasons.

So after polishing missing stuff and code errors, it was finally time to test the mod. It was pretty straightforward up to that point, but i had a foresight to guess that testing would be the hardest part. And i was right, i could release the mod much much sooner if i had just used the handling base without modifications. But it would be really underwhelming.


2- ----Grip mode and improvements----


Testing process proved to be really important, although most of the cars played nice with just the base handling values, some cars really needed some additional modifications. Also i cought and fixed some unfixed stuff from the vanilla game while testing this mod. Like classic muscle car gear ratios and McLaren F1 sounds.

Grip mode is where i spent the most time testing and modifying the handling of the cars. I tested stock cars and tier 3 cars at Autobahnring and Chicago. Chicago is for testing low and medium speed testing. It was also a good place for testing general maneuverability of the cars because the many corners. And autobahnring is for high speed testing.

While testing, i noticed that the AI drivers were shit! Previously, the game's difficulty was dependent on sluggish handling to give the illusion of a good AI. But with a handling with improved controls, they were simply autmatched. So i decided to increase the difficulty a bit to compensate for the handling. I tried to make AI drivers better at cornering at low speeds too. But i failed to do that. But at least they are better at mid and high speed tracks.

Now at this point of the development, mod was a single monolithic script. It became a bit of a problem after i added optional adjustments that may not work for everyone. So i decided to make scripts separate and allow users to customise their installation. I managed to make a great installer after jumping over a few hoops. Beware that the VltEd's own documentation is lackluster at best. So you may need to look at "alternate" sources for documentation.

(Edit: if you search "vlted documentation" on google, you will get unrelated results. Documentation exists, as always thanks google!)
 
Now back to testing! While testing the grip mode, i noticed the cars are not that unified. So i tried to tie together the cars of the game a bit. Different car classes really felt like they came from different games. It's the most abvious when you look at the difference between supercars and classic muscle cars. Most cars in the middle are mostly fine, but many does it's own thing.

(Side story: Moddb "incident")
So at this point of development, grip mode was like 90% complete. So i thought "I should put the beta version to moddb!" But there was a bit of a problem. My lazy ass created the draft mod page about a month ago, so ModDb team thought it was dead or abandoned or something, so they archived it. I contacted with them and shortly after that, they activated the mod and I released the first beta version. I had a little heart attack there first but it all went smoothly. Remember kids, don't be lazy like me. 

At the grip mode testing, the cars that stood out the most (after CCX and F1 of course) are the Aston Martin DB9 and DBR9. They were so shit in different ways. But I managed to make their handling beautiful, near the end of the testing for grip mode. Especially DBR9 handles beautiflly like it's supposed to be, since it's a race car. Also i'm really proud of the new F1 and CCX, i managed to ground these cars back to this game.

Also i need to mention that many of the values like steering speed are missing at the CCX, Mclaren F1 and Veyron. I needed to manually add the missing values. DLC cars are quite incomplete from what i saw.


3- ----Drift mode----


So after staying at grip mode for 1.5 months and adjusting every car, i decided to finish the drift mode. It was mostly done at that time, so i just needed to improve it a bit. We are at the late May by the way. Drift mode was pretty straightforward, it only took a few days to finish.

My og plan was to use a modified grip handling and use that as drift handling. Because to be honest drift handling is kinda jank. But i ran into many troubles and hard coded shinenigans. Like that ridge racer type assist that goes nowhere even if you disable every assist in the game. So i changed plans quickly, and decided to work on the existing drift handling.

In drift mode, i gave every car negative downforce and added custom tire grip values. I didn't needed extra modifications because every car worked beautifully with the base handling of the drift mode. 

The intention behind the drift mode changes were to make the drift mode more interesting. I wanted to get rid of that sluggish on a rail feeling of the original. So i made the cars slide more, and turn faster. Now players need to watch their speed at certain corners to not get slide out of the track.

Testing only lasted a day! Honestly it was a breath of fresh air after the 1.5 months of grip mode testing. I used the horrible tokyo dock yard tracks to test the handling. If it's good there, it can be good anywhere!


4- ----Speed challenge----


Speed challenge was the last mode i worked on. I decided to use grip values for the cars to make stuff more predictable, it mostly worked great. But i needed to adjust some stuff for every car to be more suitable for speed challenge. The added predictibality was a plus, because i could carry the modifications i made in the grip mode to the speed challenge.

Speed challenge was a middle ground between grip and drift. It's both straightforward and a bit time consuming. But mostly far more faster to make than the grip mode. Depending on which cars i encounter, i could finish up to 8 cars a day. But there were massive exceptions that halted the progrss and sucked my life energy too. Like that goddamn Ford Escord RS. Holy shit i spent so much time on that car, it's honestly insane. I spent a lot of time to fix that goddamn piece of shit "suspension".

But other than accasional horrible car, process was pretty straightworward. I mostly adjusted gear ratios, downforce and suspension values of the cars. I ditched the stock car testing in the speed challenge. Since every car has a single folder for speed challenge and upgraded car is higher priority in this mod. So I tested the tier 3 cars at Ebisu track. This approach worked great both on Ebisu and Nevada, but Tokyo expressway is far slower, windy and bumpy than other tracks. So i had to make adjustments to compansate for the Tokyo too.

At this point i want to talk about Nissan R35 and Porsche 911 Turbo, and how hey batshit insanely placed into the game's database. Because i had to work with these cars for the speed challenge mode. R35 has 3 folders, 2 of them belong to the prototype. And guess which folder is for the production model R35? Yes it's "gtrproto2" not the "skyliner35" and "gtrproto" folders for some reason. And 911 turbo is separated between 2 main folders named "997" and "997tt_track" for some weird reason. Luckily these types of anomalies are rare.

Car balancing in speed challenge is extra busted in my opinion. A Honda Civic can drive at the same speed as a McLaren F1. But i didn't really adjusted balancing too much in speed challenge. Mostly buffed cars to make them even faster. Speed challenge is absurd in itself so i leaned into that.

In the speed challenge mode, i tried to make cars stick to the ground more. Also modified many cars to make them more resilient against jumps. Some cars are infamous for their bouncy suspension. I mostly succeeded, but physics are as random it gets. I truly did my best to get rid most of that.


5- ----Ending----


Now we are at the end. While working on this mod, i realied that the actual physics model is quite competent. But they couldn't polish the handling in time. What a shame. ProStreet has to be one of the most unfortunate games ever made.

While making this mod, i learned so many stuff about this game. I may use this newly acquired knowledge to make better versions of this mod in the future.

So this is what happened while i was making this mod. I hope you enjoyed reading it. And i hope enjoyed the mod too! I worked a lot on this mod, honestly it would be impossible to make it without my trusty text editor!

I'm leaving now, goodbye!


