The Game

Mad Tracks is a PC racing game originally released in 2006. It is more a Micro-Machines-like party game than a real racing game: as such, handling the cars is pretty easy and the game can be recognized by all its mini-games featuring friction cars: bowling, foosball, arena fights, golf... in addition to traditional races.
Under the hood, Direct3D 9 is used for rendering, FMOD 3 as the sound engine and physics are handled by the open-source ODE physics engine, everything else directly relies on the Windows API and the STL. The game has been released one year later on Xbox360.

Writing in process

The start line

-Replays didn’t work -Online multiplayer, we managed to make the LAN mode work again, unfortunately we didn’t have time to complete this -Menus, which had been redone for the Xbox360 port with a specific technology that couldn’t be adapted again quickly for PC, were a mix of PC-specific and Xbox-specific menus were sizes were inconsistent between screens -UI in general didn’t scale following window’s resolution

The result

-The game displays fine in modern resolutions, up to 4K -Steam integration: trophies from the Xbox360 version have been reused, one has been added in the process, the overlay can be used, cloud saves are available. -Xbox controller support has been added, all controls can be changed -Anisotropic filtering has been enabled, resulting in prettier roads -Replays work again, in spite of so unidentified non-deterministic things in the game, and physic objects other than cars that are not tracked