Drift City Rebuild

A from-scratch rebuild of the online racing game Drift City in Unity, written by reverse-engineering the original DriftCity.exe function by function, plus its own game server.

This repository contains no game content. No models, textures, sounds, music, interface art, data tables or executables. You need your own installed copy of the Drift City client: the rebuild reads every original file from it while it runs and never modifies it.

Website: https://magicibrar.github.io/driftcity-unity/

Status

About 94% of the game's own code is converted (by size of the original code, after leaving out libraries and platform services the rebuild replaces on purpose). 3,032 functions are studied and cited in the notes, and 295 of the 384 dialogs the exe drives are rebuilt from the original layouts. It has 85 Unity play tests and 125 server tests. The code map has the per-subsystem breakdown.

Playable offline on your own or online on a server you host: the open cities (Moon Palace, Koinonia, Cras, Oros), traffic and HUV chases, the Battle Zone races and crew Channel Battles, the Undercity, missions and the storyline, the car show room, custom shop, parts, inventory, trade and auction, parties, friends, crews and chat, and the seasonal events.

Download

Ready-to-run builds are on the Releases page: DriftCityRebuild-Client-win64.zip (the Windows player) and DriftCityRebuild-Server.zip (the server, for whoever hosts). Neither contains game files: put your game folder into a gameroot.txt next to the exe (and in the server folder) as described below.

Point it at your game

You need the installed client: the folder that contains DriftCity.exe and Data (with Init.agt, World.agt ...). The client finds it in this order:

1. -gameRoot "C:\Games\Drift City" on the command line
2. the DRIFTCITY_ROOT environment variable
3. gameroot.txt next to the player exe (in the editor: in DriftCityOffline/, next to Assets) holding that path

The archives (.agt, Patch\Patch.*) are mounted and read directly. Optionally, Drift City → Import Game Data Into Project unpacks them into DriftCityOffline/GameData for faster loading; that folder is git-ignored and stays on your machine.

Build and run the client

1. Install Unity 6000.4.2f1.
2. Clone this repository and open DriftCityOffline in Unity Hub.
3. Create DriftCityOffline/gameroot.txt containing your game path.
4. Open Assets/Scenes/DriftCityGame.unity and press Play, or build with Drift City → Build Windows Player (no game data) (output in DriftCityOffline/Build/DriftCityPublic). Put a gameroot.txt next to the built exe as well.

git clone https://github.com/MagicIbrar/driftcity-unity.git

Host the server (online play)

Only needed to play online.

1. Install Node.js 22.5 or newer.
2. In DriftCityServer: npm install, then put your game path into DriftCityServer/gameroot.txt (or set DRIFTCITY_ROOT).
3. npm start (or start-server.bat). On the first start it reads the tables it needs from your game's archives into DriftCityServer/gamedata (git-ignored), then listens on port 7860. To redo that step: node tools/extract-gamedata.js "C:\Games\Drift City".
4. Players pick This PC, or add Name|ws://HOST:7860 to servers.txt next to the client.

npm test runs the server tests; node tools/bot.js 3 starts three test drivers.

The server is not the original one and does not speak its protocol: it is a new JSON-over-WebSocket server made for this rebuild, authoritative for money, rewards and items.

Layout

Folder	What it is
DriftCityOffline	The Unity client: file system and format readers (NayaPack, NIF, DDS, NUI, XLT/TDF), world, cars, UI, game modes, tests
DriftCityServer	The Node.js game server (own protocol), its tests and the game-data extractor
DriftCity_RE	Reverse-engineering notes with exe addresses, the opcode list and the code map
DriftCityStaging	A small .NET harness used while studying formats
docs	The project website (GitHub Pages)

Credits

• Team Vanilla — thank you for your help with this project and the GitHub repository.
• TY — thank you for your help with this project.

Contributing

Pull requests with code are welcome. Never commit game files or anything extracted from them; the .gitignore blocks the usual formats and the data folders.

Legal

A non-commercial fan project for preservation and study. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the game's developer, publisher or the Hangame portal. Drift City and all related names are trademarks of their owners. The source code is released under the MIT licence; the game and all of its content remain the property of their owners and are not distributed here.