DC-Encyclopedia

46 chapters on Drift City, from the Gamebryo files to the game's own systems.

DC-Encyclopedia documents Drift City at the engine level: the Gamebryo 20.0.0.4 formats it ships (.nif scenes, .dds textures, .kf and .kfm animation), the game's own data files such as .hit, .chpath and .loi, and the C++ class model inside DriftCity.exe.

A class model without RTTI

Drift City's game code was compiled without type information, so the usual way of recovering classes finds none of them. Its developers left their own class and method names in log and assert strings, and the book recovers the class model from those. The full surface is 196 classes: 151 from Gamebryo, 19 in the network client, the base system, and the game's own.

What the chapters cover

Among the 46: the engine and the NIF format; the HUVs, the transforming car-robots; vehicles, parts and the drift shop; missions and modes; characters; the HUD; chat; options; animation, textures and the shadow system; shaders; the tutorial; and the data tables, 49 of them, which hold the game's numbers, from 722 vehicles to 3,276 upgrades.

It is written alongside DC-SDK, which is built from the same data.