Burnout 3: Takedown - Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

A deep dive into looking at Burnout 3's various planes, trains, trams, and traffic.
The segments from Burnout 2: Point of Impact were recorded using the Dolphin emulator, running at 5K resolution but recorded at 1440p. They utilise the Free Look functionality of the emulator. The segments from Burnout 3: Takedown and Burnout Revenge were recorded using the PCSX2 emulator running at 1440p. The Burnout 3: Takedown segments make use of the developer freecam, accessible via a hexadecimal changing code. Unfortunately, no such feature exists for Burnout Revenge.
If you have any questions, about the video's content, about the freecam itself, or anything else, please don't hesitate to ask.
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:04 Island Paradise's Planes
1:44 Waterfront Museum's Plane
2:11 Downtown's Trains
2:21 Winter City's Trains
2:51 Waterfront's Trams
3:18 Winter City's Trams
3:54 Golden City's Skytrain & Misc Commentary
5:18 Traffic Spawning/Despawning & Waterfront's Underground Traffic
6:10 The Vineyard Van
6:50 Outro

[@kaniuoh911]

Burnout 3 daily life of a driver

[@NoBillsOfCrashDamage]

There's something funny about watching sped up footage of these vehicles cruising by as Mario Kart music plays 😋 In regards to the Vineyard van, it also shows up in White Mountain, and even on Dominator's Europe tracks if I'm not wrong. Easily the most reused traffic vehicle model in the series.

[@OmniGlitcher]

Indeed, kind of reminds me of those 400cc or 999cc Mario Kart mods. Oh really? I haven't spotted it in Dominator but it makes sense if it's there. I'll have to replay Dominator to check. I think the Bus might take most reused traffic model though.

[@NoBillsOfCrashDamage]

@@OmniGlitcher Oh those are hilarious. As you know, I've made Burnout absurdly faster through hex codes, too. True. The model itself is the same, just with different paint jobs.

[@angelo95234]

@@NoBillsOfCrashDamage THIS IS STEALING!

[@zipperguy7853]

p-wing in a city track = burnout kart 8

[@KingofMGS]

Very interesting coding with the trains being rendered the whole time, such a wonderful presentation

[@OmniGlitcher]

Thank you!

[@oliwidaroli4867]

I Wish i could live in Wintercity or Downtown Looks cozy there

[@ricardocruz6538]

It’s based on downtown Chicago the city I live in not that cozy lol

[@oliwidaroli4867]

@@ricardocruz6538 Thats cool. But I mean I would Like to Live in Burnout 3 Wintercity or Downtown.😅 I allways thought Downtown is in New York...sorry i'm from Germany 🤣

[@Nittaaja]

Problem: be aware of many. MANY car crashes so... maybe take the subway when your about to go out?

[@KevinAbillGaming]

​@@oliwidaroli4867 Gridlock USA in Burnout 1 is the closest thing to New York.

[@TheJacklopz]

Mario kart's enviroments have nohing to envy Burnout's enviroments, specially trams and trains. Every detail is perfect. But in Burnout 3, the traffic spawn feels totally random. Like the devs intention was to make it more challenging by programing the traffic to be more spontaneous at certain point that even can play against you (more specifically when running 1st in race event). I wondered; with all the technollogy we have, someone could rip i dunno; model cars from mario kart DD and place it into Burnout 2 or 3. For example, the caterpillar bus from mushroom city/bridge

[@OmniGlitcher]

Burnout 3's traffic spawn doesn't appear to be random entirely. I won't pretend to know exactly how the spawning works, but it likely works via an RNG seed that generates the traffic. There's a couple of these seeds used on each track. For example, the Vineyard van I used here and its surrounding traffic actually spawns on most times the track is loaded, and the traffic layout is learnable. Though there does appear to be at least one other traffic variation here. The vehicle models from Double Dash are actually already ripped in a user friendly format, including the Wiggler Bus. However, the challenge would be importing them into 2 or 3, as the vehicle model formats in these games are quite unfriendly. Certainly though, it's far from the realm of impossibility, and someone skilled enough with the model formats might be able to do it.

[@markdebruyn1212]

The trams in Burnout 3 seems to be based on the Vienna trams

[@OmniGlitcher]

The tram's basis was difficult to tell. I do think it holds the strongest resemblance to Vienna's trams, and it makes sense if it does of course, but there's also several other close resemblances from different countries. It doesn't exactly match any specific tram to my current knowledge, so I didn't specify.

[@markdebruyn1212]

@@OmniGlitcher I looked it up and it resembles the Type E2 of the vienna tram en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Vienna#/media/File:Betriebsbahnhof_Simmering_10.jpg

[@OmniGlitcher]

@@markdebruyn1212 The windows on Burnout 3's tram seem a little smaller, but I suppose there's other objects in the game with greater inaccuracy to their real life counterpart, so you can chalk it up to a slightly different model representation.

[@SALEENS7GTR5]

Ohhh so the Waterfront city is based in San Diego?

[@OmniGlitcher]

Indeed it is! In fact, basically every track in the game is based on a real life place. I plan for my next video to be about that.

[@SALEENS7GTR5]

@@OmniGlitcher cool, i'll look out for that! I remember spending time selecting the USA region over and over to try and find out where exactly it zoomed to, but could never determine.

[@OmniGlitcher]

@@SALEENS7GTR5 Haha, likewise. Yeah, the actual region maps are a composite/blending of various satellite images from a (now defunct) company called Space Imaging, to form a unique region. The region maps have basically nothing to do with the actual locations the tracks represent unfortunately.

[@ParadiseCity1329]

is it possible to replace the original tram model with the unused one and get it to work? And even if it does work, would it have a damage model?

[@OmniGlitcher]

Not at the moment. The unused tram is tied into the actual track geometry. Very few people have managed to make any headway with extracting the tracks, as it's a rather complicated process. I tried myself at one point, but there's some programming stuff there I don't know how to work with. No models have been publicly released to my knowledge either. Technically, it should be possible though, at least for this step. There would also be the matter of importing (and perhaps converting) the model into the vehicle format. Although tools do exist to export the vehicles into an external program, no such tool exists yet to import them into the game. It is again, theoretically possible, it just doesn't exist. It would also likely need some deformation points added to the model if you wanted to have it deform, yes.

[@marcoantoniodasilvabatista7203]

1:23 isnt it also used in nfs carbon or in nfs carbon it has only 2 engines?

[@OmniGlitcher]

I haven't played NFS Carbon, so I can't say for sure. However given the game wasn't made by Criterion as far as wiki tells me, I doubt it would be the same model.

[@marcoantoniodasilvabatista7203]

@@OmniGlitcher it seems like that in carbon its a model that was used in later nfs games since it has only 2 engines and they seem to fly over palmont and spawn out of bounds just like the cruise ships

[@lurkerrekrul]

Wait, Burnout 2 has a developer's camera mode too?

[@OmniGlitcher]

No. For Burnout 1 and 2, I use the GameCube versions, as the emulator for that platform (Dolphin) has a game independent free look function.

[@lurkerrekrul]

@@OmniGlitcher Thanks for the reply. I have an old computer that can't run Dolphin, so I wasn't aware of that ability.