Widescreen Gaming Forum

I stumbled across another Rally Racing game being developed in Poland called XPand Rally. They have a few screen shots up and a few avi's for what their product will HOPEFULLY look like when it is complete. As of now it looks quite nice but everything is in 4:3 (no surprise). The AVI's were pretty to look at, and some of the stuff their doing with surrounding objects (i.e. fences that you can run through and see all the boards flying and stop signs that can be sheared off, instead of stopping your car like a brick wall) look to be really nice. It does not look like the car damage component of the game has been done yet, as the cars in the AVI go slamming into telephone posts and yield signs with no damage. Be interesting to see where they go with this.

The web page is here:

http://www.xpandrally.com

For the heck of it, I wrote them an email asking them about what the potential for them adding widescreen support to the game would be. Here is their response:

Hello,
we will probably add option to set 16:9 resolution in Xpand Rally from menu
or after editing small file.
cheers
Kacper Michalski
Xpand Rally Team

Now if they do this, that would be pretty cool. Any one else seen this preliminary game before? Any comments? There is no demo yet, unfortunately.

Darren

Any word back on this one?

At E3 I saw it played it on a widescreen HDTV, but I'm not sure of the res or 720p/1080i, etc. The HUD was squashed, but duh.

Well the Xpand Rally Demo was released on August 26th, 2004 and I finally worked everything out to get it working on my 1280x720 front projector.

In the process of figuring this out, I learned a very important lesson on how DirectX and the monitor work together. When I bought my front projector, it came with no Monitor driver. After a bunch of searching I could not locate a driver for it on the net, but I did come across PowerStrip which gives you the capability of creating a monitor driver. After using it to read the projector and create a driver, I went and tried to get Colin McRae 4 up and running in 1280x720 but struggled forever with it. I found a tool on the net called DXCapviewer which is used for looking at DirectX settings on a system. Using it, I found that I was severly limited in my avaliable DirectX resolutions, maxing out at 1024x768, EVEN though I was running my desktop at 1280x720. After 6 months of struggling with this, I found a post that mentioned the importance of the monitor driver. Seeing as I had PowerStrip build mine, I figured I would revisit PowerStrip and see what I could do.

Instead of having PowerStrip build it from reading the projector settings, I enetered the data in manually using the stats at the back of my projectors manual. This included horizontal and vertical max frequencies, as well as max pixel counts. Even though my projectors native resolution was 1280x720, I entered 1280x1024 as its built in scaler could handle that. After saving the driver and installing it, I was amazed that DXCapviewer was now listing 4 times as many resolutions, all with different frequencies. SUCCESS!! I now could see the holy grail of 1280x720 in the DirectX Settings, which was my issue the whole time with any games running DirectX.

The moral of this story is that if your editing a file in a game to get widescreen capabilities, such as changing 800x600 to 1280x720, make sure that the monitor driver is setup properly and that DXCapviewer can see the resolution your shooting for. If it can't then an error will be shown when you try to run the game.


Now back to explaining how to get XPand Rally Demo up and running...

First download the demo at the following location:

http://www.xpandrally.com/en/show.php?006


Now install the game and then go into its root directory and find the Data directory. In this directory you will find a file called videosettings.scr. Open this with a text editor and locate the lines which have the horizontal and vertical resolutions (half way down the page if I remember correctly). Enter your values (mine were 1280 and 720) AND then make sure you change the frequency, which is defaults to 85. Whatever frequency you saw DXCapviewer list with your desired resolution should be entered here (DXcapviewer had my 1280x720 listed with 60Hz). Save the file and then run the game.

As expected, you will see the game in full resolution, but alas the developers coded it with 4:3 in mind, as everything is stretched out due to the extra width. It would be nice if they had thought of 16:9 sooner. Maybe in a future patch.

Either way, the game is fantastic looking and has some of the nicest driving graphics I've ever seen. It supports 4 players via LAN with (or without - your choice) Collisions, which deviates away from the normal rally type games. You can also set the time of the race, so you could go with noon and have everything sunny, or have it 3 in the morning when its pitch black, at which point you would have to use your front head lights to see (don't hit anything or they will break!!!). The clouds in the sky in this game are unreal, as they float across the sky, casting shadows on the ground as your racing.

As for the quality of game, it is very good. I would place it between being a simulation and an arcade game, leaning more toward the simulation withs its realistic physics. Will this be as realistic as Richard Burns Rally? No, but it is still a blast to play in either Simulation Mode or Arcade Mode. If I was a better driver, I could comment more on the simulation side of things, but I'm not so I won't.

Any ways, if your into racing games and would like to have a game which you can drive off the road and go any place you want, then this game is for you (its a setting within the game to allow you to roam around the whole country side instead of just being limited to the road). Check it out, and play it in widescreen!!!

Darren

OK it works by changing the resolution in VideoSettings.scr. Fortunately, the game doesn't just stretch, but it removes the upper and lower part of the vision. Does anyone know how to change the FOV? It's an awesome game, only have played the demo.

Pnieuwla,

Good to see someone else is interested in this game. I went and bought it after playing the demo for a month. The game rocks.

I have never thought about chaging the FOV to get back the top and bottom that have been cut off until last week. I am in the middle of writting a tutorial on how to make Xpand Rally Maps for beginners. In one of the sections I am currently working on, I have a need to take screen shots of the car throwing up the different particles (dirt, dust, grass, snow, etc.) but with my screen cutting off the bottom, I am unable to see the tires of the car on the outside view.

This prompted me to find where the FOV settings are. They are in a file called model.scr. Each car has a model.scr so any changes would have to be repeated on each car model.scr. In total there are 10 cars, so ten files would have to be editted. The location of these model.scr files is:

..techlandXpanddatacars"car directory"model.scr

If you look within the model.scr file you will see the 5 different views possible for each car. Each view has its own FOV setting.

I have not played with these settings yet so I cannot comment on what a good setting for each one might be. I will eventually get to that, but for the time being I'm too busy writting this tutorial.

If you do have success in changing the FOV without distorting the image, post your results so I can give them a try.

Then go out and buy the game. It is a lot of fun to play online. Its biggest problem is that it has not been released in North America so it has very few people who have bought it to play. Most of the time you have to arrange to meet up with everyone at a specific time to get any multiplayer games going. Hopefully by making my tutorial and getting people involved in building new maps that are fun to drive on, the amount of people will increase and make the game even better.

After the tutorial is done, a friend of mine and myself are going to model a realistic map of Pikes Peak. We already have almost everything we need, except for a first hand view of someone driving up and down the whole way. All TV coverage we have collected only covers sections that had cameras, so we need someone to drive up and down the mountain with a video camera to film what it looks like. Once we have that, Pikes Peak will become a reality in the game.

If your interested in getting to know more about the game, check out this web site:

http://racing.edgegaming.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=61

Darren
aka "Darkdog"

Nice info Man,

I 'aquired' this game yesterday and had a quick blast with it, seems fun, bt still doesn't have the charisma of Rallisport Challenge which has the perfect balance of Arcade and simulation for me - easy to just fire it up for 15 mins of fun. I'm still dying for someone to work out how to get that playing at 16:9 (or for Rallisport 2 to come out on PC)

Any hooooooooo I'll probably play the 2 alongside each other and will also be running this at 1280x720 on my digital projector (racing games at 92" across are awesome!!!!) so let us know how those FOV settings work out.

Thanks for sharing the info, I'll be modding my install tonight.

If you have aquired the game, some of the first things you have to do is change the names of the cars to match their real names. You can find this mod on the R.E.G. web site I wrote above in the previous post. It adds to the enjoyment when you have the real car names.

I've also done the sign advertising mod which changes the signs to represent the real signs seen in the WRC. There is so much that can be done with this game for moding that it can't be beat. Techland has included the Chrome editor with the game so that you can create your own maps that are almost limitless in possibilities. I've never mod'd a game before in my life, but after playing this game for a few days, it inspired me to make a tutorial to help advertise the game and increase its popularity. I didn't think the tutorial would end up being 100+ pages but it will be in the end. I'm sitting at 82 right now and I have a few more sections to do before it is complete. By that time I expect it to be around 120 pages long. Hopefully others will pick it it and be inspired to create their own master pieces to share with everyone. I can only hope! Oh ya, and have it released in North America.

Darkdog