SODA Off-Road Racing

Backstory

According to Shawn Nash, who kindly responded to my email, Software Allies (basically just Shawn) were contracting for Papyrus in 1995-1996 to port NASCAR Racing 2 to support the nVidia NV1 GPU.

At the end of that contract, Software Allies entered into a developer/publisher deal with Papyrus to deliver a script, functional design, tech design then product that could have been cancelled at any point by Papyrus. During that time Sierra Sports bought Papyrus, and took over as the publisher. Sierra (via Papyrus) funded SODA under an advance against royalties model.

Grand Prix Legends Test Bed?

Contrary to everything you may have ever read, no technology from SODA went into anything Papyrus were doing, with Shawn saying “they were way way ahead of me.”

“Papyrus kept offering to help, and we should have let them, but we were concerned about ownership (foolishly) and pretty much did it all alone without any experience or art knowledge – a big mistake. We bit off more than we could chew, I worked seven days a week for almost two years from when I got out of bed until I went to sleep at night.”

Overview

Originally previewed by Sierra as “Gripped: Off-Road Championship”. Developed primarily by Shawn Nash (who went on to work with Papyrus on the NASCAR Racing 4 DirectX/OpenGL engine and later at iRacing), SODA was a racing video game based on the Short Course Off-Road Drivers series, but did not contain any official cars or tracks.

It was by far the most complex simulation of racing at the time it was released and pushed the genre forwards with full “3D” physics that allowed the car to roll and jump. It also included a fully-featured track editor that allowed users to create and share their content with others, making this the first title to truly support third-party “modded” content.

The damage taken to the cars could result in body panels falling off, transmission/engine destruction, and multiple wheels flying off.

There were no real tracks or real cars. The following vehicles were included:

4×4 – Truck. 800hp.
2×4 – Almost as light as a buggy. Similar handling to sprint car.
Buggy – Not as hard to keep on track as the 2×4 not as hard to drive as the 4×4.

Running on Windows 10:

SODA can run fine in software rendering mode on Windows 10 with compatibility settings for an older Windows version like Windows 98 set. If the installer fails to run you should check the wait chain.

If you want to run with Rendition graphics you will need a Rendition video card and either an old Windows 95 or 98 PC with the card properly setup – or – you can use the card in a modern machine using Windows 10 Pro’s Hyper-V as long as you can get the Windows 10 host to recognize it as a video card (able to output video using the Microsoft Basic Display Driver). You will obviously need to install a Windows 95 or 98 OS onto the VM client and then use PCI passthrough for the GPU, installing the drivers for the actual video card onto the VM. SODA recognizes both v1 and v2 Rendition cards without patching.

Rendition rendering allows higher resolutions, maximum 30fps framerate, sharper textures and better aliasing. Though obviously the appearance of textures and aliasing is arguably improved simply by an increased resolution.