StEdit

(Project completed: 1994)

StEdit is a program that allows you to create your own terrains upon which to build racetracks for the Stunts driving game.

Stunts is an outdated but still very enjoyable race car game from Distinctive Software and Br0derbund. It's a 3D game with multiple camera modes and polygon graphics (this was before texture mapping was practical on PCs). There were some amusing bugs in the physics modelling that occasionally resulted in some amazingly impossible crashes.

Anyway, the point is that the game has a built-in editor that allows you to design your own racetracks. However, there are only five predefined terrains (combinations of hills, flat areas and water) upon which to build those tracks.

[ Screenshot ]
Screen shot

StEdit is a quick'n'dirty program I whipped up to solve this problem (and practice my coding skills). It allows you to place hills and water where you want, and save the terrain to a Stunts .TRK track file. You can then load this file with the game's built-in editor and make a race track on your custom terrain.

I have since learned that Stunts does actually have a built-in terrain editor, much to my embarassment. However, it's just as awkward as the built-in track editor. I prefer StEdit mainly because of the Auto mode feature that eliminates the tedium of placing the correct edges for the hills.

The program has limitations and I could do better now, but it's usable and in my opinion good enough a file editor for a long-obsolete game.

StEdit requires 256-color VGA, MS-DOS and a Microsoft-compatible mouse.

stedit17.zip (41K)

Download the executable. It was made for MS-DOS so you'll probably need an emulator or virtual machine to run it.