City research

Making new cities have been a bit more difficult to achieve than vehicles, it seems. Only recently have completely new cities begun to surface. This depends mainly on the fact that the file formats for the cities haven't been explained until now. While the information presented here still isn't complete, it is vital for making cities the way that Angel Studios did it.

Pathset cities

In the early days of city modifications the file format that was partly understood and used was the PATHSET format. Normally this format is used to place props, like trash cans and lamp posts in a city. The discovery of how this format works enabled people to modify the exisiting cities in MM2. It became possible to add new objects, even ramps and extra roads and buildings. Pioneer in this field was PC425 and her team at Creative Cities. They published the MegaMod series and other city modifications.

PSDL cities

After a while PC425 discovered the basics of the PSDL file format, this is the format that the real cities are made of. But still the information extracted was not complete. The "PSDL Terrain Editor", the first available PSDL editor, made by PC425 and her team was difficult to work with, and when she and her team discontinued this project and left the MM2 community, the dream of making new cities faded. But it did not die.

The idea of using the PATHSET files grew. People used simple, flat PSDLs, either produced by PC425, or found inside the MM2 core files. On top of these PSDLs they placed larger and larger objects, now these objects were no longer ramps or road sections-they were complete cities. The limitations of this approach are obvious-the props are objects that can be seen from any direction, and they can be hit by a car and break apart and or bounce off the car. The computation work that MM2 must perform on all objects placed with a PATHSET file is immense.

PSDL cities - again

During the year 2002 fre_ber, started working on the MM2 file formats. He started with the PSDL format and continued in the footsteps of Creative City. This research, and fre_ber's wish for cooperation, lead to the development of the PSDL Viewer. Currently this is the most complete PSDL editor available. And even though it never was intended for actually making cities, some people try to do just that.

INST cities

Another file format, the INST, was raising an interest. It turned out that this format is very similar, in function, to the PATHSET file format. It can be used to place 3D objects on a PSDL. The difference between the INST and the PATHSET is that MM2 can do a lot more optimizations on the INST file. All objects therein are stationary, and they can not break apart. Pioneers in breaking the INST file format were Madness Sting, author of the Madness City series of new cities for Midtown Madness 2. fre_ber and Martin_sw had a part in making the INST format specification publicly available by, independently from Madness Sting, researching the format.

Real MM2 cities

The first attempt to create a city the same way that Angel Studios did it, with a proper PSDL file, was made by Tomatokatchup from the French Midtown Madness community. His city, named "Oceany" featured a ring of highways made in PSDL surrounding a city made in the traditional way. Even though this city contained a lot of errors, espescially in the PSDL file, it deserves a place in the history books.

Somewhere around this time, Zentra enters the scene. He jumps out of nowhere with an almost complete piece of software that not only creates a PSDL file based on GPS position data, it also generates BAI files. BAI is the file that controls ambients. Ambients are the pedestrians and the automated traffic in MM2. This file format had been previously unexamined, even though several individuals had some ideas about what they contained. Unfortunately Zentra didn't publish his research, only the software.

Now, another clever member of MM2C started to work on the MM2 formats. Driver managed to uncover the secrets of many of the block attributes, the geometric primitives of PSDL. The most spectacular were the divided road attributes and the tunnel/railing attribute. Unfortunately, Driver was distracted by this thing called life and hasn't been very active in the continuing research of the MM2 file formats for some time.

A while later, Norway came to the rescue. Yallis cracked the BAI file format wide open in just a few weeks. Even though the research still isn't 100% complete he managed to place controlled ambients in his test city called Moronville. Though filled with morons, this city shows a lot more controlled ambients than the previous examples made by Zentra.

Yallis continues to work, both on BAI and the still unexplained PSDL block attributes.

Conclusion

The community still doesn't have complete information about how to make perfect modifications to Midtown Madness 2, but it is very, very close.

This account for the history of MM2 city reserach might have missed several people that were vital in the process of examining the inner workings of MM2 up until now, but hopefully they won't have any hard feelings. Inform fre_ber, and he might be able to rectify the situation and ammending the history books.