[FINDING] Found some interesting strings in UG2

GUYS!1! LOOK:

I was right ! (And also I finally managed to do something cool !) All I did was hook into game's code to call address 004ACA40, and it did this, now I didn't just called the function at 004AC950 (the one that gets the three string as input) because sometimes function also get inputs via the registers, or there need to be certain stuff initialized before, so I played it safe and called 004ACA40, but who knows calling 004AC950 probably works too.

EDIT: I forgot to mention it because I thought it assumed, but the game doesn't actually change the current track to Nirvana - Dumb (it almost certainly doesn't exist in the game's file anyway), it just display the EA Trax UI, the song that played before the Nirvana EA Trax popup isn't changed and continue playing as if nothing happened.

Now If you want to see it yourself my executable is, I think, 1.2 US version & NoCD which has a 4,7mb size so if you got the same executable it should work, you'll need cheat engine, open your game's process, click on "memory view", a window will open called "Memory Viewer", click "tools" and select at the very bottom "Auto Assemble", then copy paste this:
click the "file" button at the top-left, and finally click "Assign to current cheat table", now there is "auto-assemble script" in your cheat table activate it and the EA Trax UI should appear, to see it again disable it then activate it again, and also now you can close the Auto Assemble and Memory Viewer windows.


Also I remembered that I saw a "CODEINE" string one time, and indeed here it is in the referenced strings:

Now for those who don't know what Codeine is well it is a opiate (morphine, heroin, oxycodone, fentanyl are in this same family) used as painkiller, but also used for recreational purpose, it gain popularity recently with rappers talking about drinking lean (a homemade drink containing Codeine) in their songs, so here's that, but also as I have said previously since this a referenced string, this string is actually used by the game's code (but as I have said before this doesn't mean the code in question gets executed) and in this case 7 times ! I looked quickly and apparently it is pushed to the function at SPEED2.exe+22C0 in each seven occurrences, also this function seems to have 4 parameters, the last one is the string "CODEINE" of course and I haven't made sense of the rest, I will work on that later, and I will also try to call this function to see what happen just like I did above.


I also kept thinking about the nirvana things and even if it was a placeholder why is it THIS song, I mean they could've have used anything else and the devs already had EA Trax planned and/or made in NFS:UG (NFS:UG2 development began in July 2003 before UG's release), so they could have just tested stuff with what was planned/made in NFS:UG, so unless EA Trax was developed really late in UG's development (which seems very unlikely) it doesn't make sense.

My new guess is that this probably this date back from the very early time of UG2 development and they were thinking about having a different atmosphere than the final one, maybe a darker one, maybe the game was more story-focus and dramatic, after all that is what happened with MW 2012 the early concept and beta are radically different from retail, that is the only answer I could find valid because the song doesn't really fit the tuner "theme"...
Or maybe I am overthinking it and it's just that a Blackbox dev liked Nirvana and used Nirvana string as test string and maybe even a Nirvana song to test playback (also EA Blackblox had headquarters in Burnaby Canada near the Seattle area which is where Nirvana originated, so maybe some dev had some history with the band).

However there is still one thing that remain it's that those strings date probably from very early development, and it would be understandable that there were just strings lost somewhere, but there is an actual functioning piece of code that work in the final version, I am wondering how it made it to the end, it was either extremely lucky, or the code in question was maybe buried somewhere and, after some time, devs forgot about it, after all there is a bunch of leftovers in other NFS.


And finally the "CODEINE" string is also a really really weird one, the fact that is used in the game's code mean that it can't be a random/lucky thing, someone at Blackbox typed that on purpose knowing what it is (which is probably quite risky: you don't want your boss knowing you typed that, they could be suspicious about you, or maybe he (boss) didn't know what it was, because Codeine at the time was not as "famous" as it is now), now my guess would be that this has to do with the bloom+blur that is applied to the screen when you use NOS, why ? Because although Codeine doesn't cause any visual hallucinations (or any sensory hallucinations for that matter) if you could describe its effects with an image/visual effects it would be bloom+blur (It is a far stretch I know, but it is the only explanation I see).

Nice one dude!