Hard Truck Games

[Jon Levatte]

Theoriginal Hard Truck, also subtitled as Hard Truck: Road to Victory, was developed by Russian developer SoftLab-NSK published by Buka Entertainment, and released on April 20, 1998.[1] It emphasized truck racing, in which players can race against trucks without cargo on a 3-lap circuit or with cargo to deliver on any of 3 linear courses, with no other vehicles present. All racing courses, including a training course, are accessible from a central base of operations where the player can obtain cargo, as well as purchase upgrades or even new trucks.

Hard Truck 2: King of the Road is a 2000 sequel to Hard Truck. Like its predecessor, it is open world, but grants far more freedom with a larger world that only requires one loading screen per play session, while shifting focus from racing to cargo transport across various cities (although competition with rival truckers is still present). It also adds traffic, police and mafia, and trucks can fall under attack if drivers do not practice safe driving or are spotted by mafia. Making money with successful deliveries is crucial to gameplay, as running out of funds would result in a game over, and the ultimate goal of the game is to achieve dominance of the trucking market (with at least a 51% stake), but not before gaining enough money to start a company first.

The sequel incorporates the same truck brands from the first game, while also including Volvo, Scania AB and Mercedes-Benz Actros. Cars that can be encountered in gameplay include the BMW M5, the Renault Megane, the Fiat Marea, the Offroad HL/PS, the Oka and the Volga.

In 2002, a third Hard Truck game developed by SCS Software was also released, subtitled 18 Wheels of Steel. Unlike the previous two Hard Truck games, it removes racing altogether and focuses entirely on delivery of goods, playing more similar to Hard Truck 2. It also incorporates a traffic system, as well as elements of business management simulation, where drivers can be hired and routes set up to make a profit.

Hard Truck Apocalypse, released on June 26, 2006, is another spin-off of Hard Truck, but its connection to the themes of Hard Truck is remotely in name only. Developed by the Russian developer Targem Games, Apocalypse is a completely different take on the Hard Truck games, set in an apocalyptic, Mad Max-like future. A disaster occurred and everyone on Earth has to wear special masks to survive. Trade runs between villages to make money can still be done but the main method for making money is to loot destroyed enemies of cargo and weapons.

The game takes place in an apocalyptic version of Europe, with different zones depicting countries like Germany, France, England, and many more. Five vehicles, from a simple van to the gigantic BelAZ, are available to drive. The guns vary from roof-mounted machine guns, shotguns, and mortars to laser and energy weapons.

I'm currently trying to get to run this Russian truck racing/simulation game, Hard Truck: Road to Victory. It's been released in 1998, was initially designed for DirectX 5, and despite some reports from around the web of people getting it to run on Win7 x64 systems, has been a terrible chore so far.

From testing on a variety of systems and virtual machines, most of the times the result is exactly the same: the Direct3D-accelerated version either complains about a DirectX version mismatch, or claims that there is not enough VRAM available. The software-rendered version crashes upon entering the game, sometimes with a generic memory access violation, but most often with error messages along the lines of:

which would suggest that there is some floating point overflow happening somewhere (the "f2pi(): param too large -nan." bit seems to be the same always, while the part below (the calling function?) changes occasionally). I have tested on my main desktop computer (Win7 x64, i7, GTX 970), several virtual machines (VMware Player, VirtualBox, XP Mode) running different guest OS (95, 98, XP), and D3D wrappers (WineD3D, DXGL, dgVoodoo2). The software version always crashed immediately, the Direct3D mode wouldn't be accepted with the stated messages.

So far so unsuccessful. However, while waiting for a friend in Starbucks, I tinkered some more with my laptop (Lenovo T420s, Win7 x64, i7, Intel HD 3000 + NVIDIA NVS 4200M), and suddenly, as long as I forced the system to run the game on the NVIDIA GPU, I could actually get the game to accept setting the Direct3D version, which seemed to play fine! Later at home, though, on the same system, it suddenly wouldn't anymore, draw one buggy frame and then crash like on all the other systems.

Have any of you ever had anything similar, a game running or not running depending on energy settings? If I could find the underlying cause of this, it might help figuring out how to get it to run on other systems.

Note 1: For what it's worth, I remember that many years back, already having trouble trying the play the same game, I finally resorted to playing it on an Asus eeePC netbook running WinXP (I believe I played the software version back then). It seems back then that was the only system I owned that could run the game. So I suspect that it might be down to a race condition, and that it is in fact slower, or slowed-down, systems that are less prone to the crashes. I don't currently have access to that netbook, so I couldn't tell you any more details about its configuration, or try if it still works with the game.

Note 2: That the game accepted the Direct3D setting on my laptop, but claimed my desktop computer had too little VRAM, makes me believe that maybe the 4GB VRAM on my desktop card led to an overflow in the detected memory value. Is there a way to fake a smaller VRAM for legacy applications?

Powersave mode sometimes involves underclocking the CPU. Perhaps your CPU is too fast for the game? I would suggest WinThrottle, but that hasn't been tested in Windows 7. Another possibility is that you might need to set the game to run on a single core, i.e. changing its affinity. (There are many guides on how to do this.)

I'm not sure anymore whether it's just about the speed. On my desktop, I changed process affinity to one CPU and used Battle Encoder Shirase to selectively slow down just the game's process. It does run and load much more slowly, but after entering the game it only takes about 2 seconds longer before it crashes the same way as before. I'll try and see what other settings the power save mode might change.

I couldn't find an option to hide VRAM from the application in 3D Analyzer, unfortunately. dgVoodoo2 seems to have that option, but choosing a 64MB or 16MB card to be emulated doesn't have an effect, the game still complains "Not enough texture memory on your accelerator."

As for actual downclocking the CPU, I don't know if there is an alternative in Windows aside from Windows power settings. I tried setting my max. CPU performance to 5%, but it doesn't seem to have an effect on my desktop CPU. Probably that is the main thing that makes the game work on my laptop.

Unfortunately that didn't fix it, and I now believe that the error message of too little texture memory is false. I noticed that if I choose a lower resolution, the error message changes to one saying that the installed version of DirectX is incompatible. Further, I found a demo version of the game using an earlier build of the engine, and there the error is the incompatible DirectX version regardless of the resolution selected. (The archived game website says that the newer builds fixed compatibility with 3D accelerators.) So the fact that I can't get the D3D version to run on some systems might be a deeper incompatibility.

Edit: To anyone who wants to get the software version of this game to run in VMware, you'll have to go to your VM's hardware settings, and in the Processors section activate the checkbox Disable acceleration for binary translation. You can turn this on and off even while the VM is running. Only windowed mode will work, I haven't yet figured out how to get fullscreen to work. The game complains that the video mode isn't supported; forcing 16-bit mode didn't help.

Edit 2: If I didn't get it to run on the Win98 VM, I'd have been just about ready to give up on this mess of a game at this point. Now the Direct3D version won't run on my laptop anymore. Power save mode on or off makes no difference, it will not run regardless. It's the same now as the D3D version in virtual Windows XP (rendering one broken frame before crashing). I've played it on this system for about an hour, and absolutely nothing changed, and now I can't convince it to run anymore no matter what I try. If anyone ever figures out what star constellation this game depends on to run, let me know! ?

dgvoodoo is a program that i've been experimenting with a lot to resolve issues with older games. i decided to use it for hard truck: road to victory and did some serious testing with certain options to see where they lead me.

using the 3dfx voodoo wrapper that comes with the program allows me to load up the game and access the main base area, but i couldn't load any other maps; the game gave me memory related errors like the ones you're getting. i had a hunch to look at the truck.ini that sits in the main directory, and one variable in there caught my eye and had me thinking - eff. eff, by default, is defined with a value of 1023. this was a shot in the dark, but i edited the memory value that sets in the 3dfx options for dgvoodoo to match eff's value. lo and behold, i can successfully load other maps, though the game tends to crash with the hardware renderer randomly still; i think that's because softlab-nsk didn't really perfect it.

another important step is to change the compatibility mode of htruck.exe to windows nt 4.0, and to never play with 7 other truck ai's; the game seems to crap itself if there's two of the same trucks on the same map and doesn't know how to handle it

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