22 December 1997 build

This is a sub-page of Proto:Redline Racer (Windows).

General Differences#

• Copyright year is 1997. This is reflected in the title screen.
• There is no Ubi Soft or Criterion Studios cinematic during loading.
• When run in Marketing mode, the game complains that there is no mdemo.txt file in the common directory. It displays this as a dialogue box and then quits. The final game simply fails to find the CD, forcing you to terminate the game abnormally. Creating it as an empty file causes the game to crash.
• There seems to be more bumps in the tracks. Either that, or the collision detection with the ground is buggy. Either way, whether you crash seems largely dependent on luck rather than skill, and the AI is also affected.
• Players sometimes respawn inside each other, causing them to immediately crash again.
• There are only eight riders in a race. However, like the final, this can be changed in menudata.ini. Unlike the final, there can only be a maximum of eight riders.
• Victories are not recorded, making it impossible to unlock anything.
• There is no INSOMNIA cheat code to unlock everything.
• There is no 3dfx version; only Direct3D is available.
• The level order is different (Le Grand Blanc, Castle Race Way, Mount Etienne, and Europa Metropolis do not yet exist):

Visual Differences#

This needs some investigation. Discuss ideas and findings on the talk page. Specifically: There may be visual differences on the levels, but it's difficult to tell whether they're Direct3D-3dfx differences.

• The font is different.
• The word 'position' is displayed to the left of the position display.
• The colours of the riders on the map are different. Here, they're in several colours, whereas the final only has three: flashing green for you, red for riders ahead of you, and blue for riders behind you.

Prototype	Final

• The race results displays all racers, and there is no medal displayed for the winners. In the final, racers don't appear on the table until they actually finish.

Prototype	Final

Sound Differences#

• There is a different sound on hovering the cursor over a menu button (however, the prototype sound seems to have been kept in non-English versions of the final game):

• There is no 3D sound support.
• The disc has six music tracks rather than five. However, the sixth track is very similar, if not identical, to the fifth.

Header Files#

The language\english\ui\screens folder contains C/C++ header files containing definitions for UI object IDs.