Mario Kart Arcade GP 2 — SNES Mario Circuit 3 (MKAGP2 Custom Track)

Описание: Here is the first Custom Track ever made for Mario Kart Arcade GP 2! A fairly basic SNES track, ported from Mario Kart Wii. This underrated game has been in my modding wishlist for a while, so recently I decided to start working on a CT, which involved more than what you may think!

MKAGP2 suffers from huge limitations in terms of modding. In addition to the formats' insufficient documentation, the game's particular nature and the majority of its features being hardcoded makes it almost impossible for Custom Tracks to be implemented. For instance, the game does not have any sort of boost collision (excluding warp areas, which are a whole different topic), nor any ramps to jump from, as well as no fall areas nor respawn points.

About a year ago, I began analyzing and decoding the game's collision, as seen in my tweet here:   / 1542544570306764804   and from then on, not much happened. I already created a program that could export collision and route data, but there was no way for me to import anything back into the game. Thankfully, Ploaj's HSDRawViewer (https://github.com/Ploaj/HSDLib) made it simpler to import visual models and textures, although I still had to get around some bugs with the materials here and there.

Making laps count was another difficult task: the checkpoint system only consists of a simple linear path. This implies that the sections between checkpoints cannot be precisely specified, unlike other Mario Kart games, making it easy to skip checkpoints and not count the lap if you go too far from the range. Enemy routes function similarly to how they do in the other entries, although there's one route for each player.

Unfortunately, object data, as well as starting positions, coins, item boxes, cameras and areas are all hardcoded. These were the most diffuclt components of the track to create, and I had to spend quite some time disassembling the game's code in order to figure out where everything was located. I made code patches for the startline, coins and item box positions, but not for the cameras and areas.

As for the collision, it was a total mess. I got some help from Wexos, who made a working model importer for it, and we were able to figure out how it functions for the most part. However, walls are weird in this game and have become a major issue, since not only they're not stored as regular polygons like the road, but instead they use the road's angle values as well as some kind of quad arrays. I had some workarounds, but the game did not like it as much, and that's why you can see some lag spikes in the middle of the race. But overall, we got fairly close to making it work properly.

Don't expect many more CTs from my side, since I don't have much interest in this game, but it's definitely a fun and challenging experience I might try again in the future with a more complex track. I really hope this game's modding community grows.

During the development of the track I wrote some documentation which I may clear up and publish sometime, for those who are interested.

Download (goes over Stadium Arena):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h3mc...

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