Hot Wheels: A new incredible sprite/tile bank...

Hi everyone!

I would like to share with you my recent discovery before attempting to make some use of it... it looks AMAZINGLY PROMISING. When reading this Fandom wiki about the Phoenix engine (https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Phoenix_engine), I learned that the game "Hot Wheels: Bash Arena (2002)" - developed by Micro Forté was also done using Fallout Tactics's engine. So I downloaded it using this abandonware site : (https://www.myabandonware.com/game/hot-wheels-bash-arena-dhu) and started fishing for files inside the game...

After mounting the .iso, it was clear to me that the game architecture is very similar to Tactics's, so it is easy to take any .hw file there and change it to .zip to get access to each and every game file... like sprites (.spr) and tiles (.til). I opened them in Sprite Editor and Red!Viewer and they work! Some might need a little work to be used, but the terms used while making them is similar to tactics. For example, the doors sprites appear usable out of the box.

The tiles and sprites are amazing, they use the same 2D isometric view and looks quite identical in style as any other Fallout Tactics content...

I doupt that the entities (that have the extension .e) can be used as they of course have other data, but I think it is just some minor inconvenient.

Enjoy!

 

I never use Red!Viewer other than to view sprites and create unanimated tiles, it often crash when exporting spites or fuck up colors when making animated tiles.

I opened the files with Sprite Creator and was able to see and animate them, so I think they might be already ready to be added to the game using Entity editor. If not, nome corrections to animation names could be made in Sprite Creator I guess beforehand, keeping the original file.

I also think .til can be used as is. I saw some of them in my Tactics folder already, the exact same ones, like a kind of big chrome cylinder that I used and a kind of pallet too.

 

Oh, that doesn't look good. I'll try to integrate some of them (.til and .spr) of different types (scenary, explosive and doors) and report you back on this. I wish at least the doors/gates are working, they look amazing.

 

If I had just the slightest idea how to assign you that role I'd do it

 

Yep, sorry for the false hope and thanks for the info. I tested the sprites and did not find a single way to add them. It either crash Sprite Editor, crash Red!Viewer when attempting anything with them other than displaying, and the engine does not show them out of the box. The only usable contents are, yes, the tiles, and I already seen some of them in previous mods. I managed to include some of them to a map with some tweeks, but they are not the most interesting.

I think I will be able to copy/paste some of the most simple sprites frame by frame to include them manually in the game, if I do so I'll make these assets available for download to you folks.

 

Ha! That's neat Ok yeah just saying I managed to assemble a collection of interesting tiles converted to Tactics and I am working on recreating by hand a bunch of animated sprites too. I have about 10-15 of them (4 new doors, 2 fountains, wall and ground fans, 1 big fire, 1 rock crusher, etc.), I will post them here soon with a link.

 

If someone's interested, I finally managed to recreate by hand or adapt a small collection of contents (animated sprites and tiles) from Hot Wheels to make it compatible with Fallout Tactics. There is some pretty much interesting stuff in there, including 5 new doors, 2 of them being exclusive doors not related to Hot Wheels. Feel free to use that content any way you like. I didn't test a lot those files yet, so they might need some ajustments here and there.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/thesum/addons/diverse-contents-from-hot-wheels-bash-arena#downloadsform