Burnout Infinity: Shitbox

Burnout 3-style arcade racer, Aussie shitboxes, Woolies carparks. Godot 4.6 + Blender, native Apple Silicon.

Run

/Applications/Godot.app/Contents/MacOS/Godot --path .

Controls: WASD/arrows drive, Shift drift, Space boost, R reset (or retry after Crash Mode), Esc menu.

Modes

• Cruise — free roam with traffic, plus two rivals lapping the circuit. Pull alongside one at speed and it's an Outrun (NFSU2 rules, our code): first to gap the other by 250 m wins. Straight-line distance decides when it ends — so ducking down a side street is a real escape — but path order decides who won, so reversing away from the circuit is a loss. Winning pays takedown-tier boost. R mid-duel is a forfeit.
• Crash Mode — 60 seconds, rack up damage dollars ramming traffic and parked cars.
• Crash Junctions — pick a "CRASH JCT" entry in the level list: launch into scripted cross-traffic convoys at a real intersection, then Aftertouch-steer your wreck (arrows) and detonate the Crashbreaker (space). Damage tally + bronze/silver/gold. Events live in levels/<id>/junctions.json; generate more from real intersections with tools/osm_junction.py <area.json> <out.json> <lat0> <lon0> "Name|Street A|Street B".
• Race — 3 laps vs 3 rubber-banded rivals on the level's RacePath.

The boost loop is Burnout 3's: earn boost by drifting, near-missing traffic, and smashing things. Wrecking a rival near you = TAKEDOWN — refills the meter and grows it (up to 4x). Hard crashes shed body panels and trigger Impact Time slow-mo.

Cars

A car is a folder: cars/<id>/stats.tres + optional car.glb. Models are built procedurally — specs live in tools/build_cars.py, one dict per car (silhouette profile, dimensions, paint). Rebuild all GLBs with:

/Applications/Blender.app/Contents/MacOS/Blender -b -P tools/build_cars.py

Model convention (any GLB works, hand-modelled or generated):

• Nose faces +Y in Blender (imports as Godot -Z forward).
• Node origin 0.75 m above ground level (the controller's ride height).
• Objects named det_* are detachable — the game rips them off on impact (doors, mirrors, bumpers, bonnet, boot).
• Current fleet: 30 shitboxes, from the Datto 120Y to the FLOORED LAZZA 1.5 ('82 Laser hatch, rear louvres that shed slat-by-slat — John's actual first car, built from his photos). Piss-take names on purpose: real model names and badges are trademarks.

To improve a silhouette: supply a side-on photo + front three-quarter photo, tweak the profile points in the spec, rebuild, screenshot.

Stats are low-key reversed: the shitboxier the car was in real life, the better it performs here. The Excel X3 is the fastest car in the game; the muscle cars are all bark.

Downloaded models (from shitboxes/, gitignored + .gdignore'd) convert via:

/Applications/Blender.app/Contents/MacOS/Blender -b -P tools/import_shitbox.py -- "<file>" <car_id> <length_m> [yaw_deg]

Imported cars don't shed det_* panels until someone cuts their doors out in Blender.

Real-world levels from OpenStreetMap

Real street grids, our art style, clean collision, ODbL-licensed. Fetch a bbox from the OSM API, convert, build (queen_st_mall was made exactly like this):

curl -A 'BurnoutShitbox/1.0' 'https://api.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/map?bbox=<minlon>,<minlat>,<maxlon>,<maxlat>' -o area.xml
python3 tools/osm_xml_to_json.py area.xml area.json   # see git history / osm_level_args.py
ARGS=$(python3 tools/osm_level_args.py area.json "<spawn way name>" "<loop street 1,2,3,4>")
Blender -b -P tools/build_level_osm.py -- area.json <level_id> <origin_lat> <origin_lon> $ARGS

Don't reconstruct from Street View imagery (ToS + melted collision). Use photos as reference to hand-detail hero landmarks on the OSM base.

Levels so far: woolies_carpark, queen_st_mall, southbank, albert_parklands, story_bridge (procedural steel truss along Bradfield Highway), kangaroo_point.

Area JSONs are cached in ~/.cache/burnout_osm (override with $OSM_CACHE); tools/build_all_levels.sh rebuilds every level from them.

What the builder makes of the OSM data

Beyond the street grid and building footprints, it uses the furniture OSM already carries — street lamps, benches, bins, bollards, bus stops and the whole footway network — so most of the detail is real Brisbane, not invented:

• Buildings extrude with a glazed shopfront band at street level, a cantilevered awning over the footpath (three canvas colours, varied heights, ~70% of buildings — a whole street at one height in one colour reads as a painted stripe), a roof parapet, and a plant room on anything tall.
• Footpaths come from the OSM footway ways, raised 14 cm with a chamfered kerb. The chamfer is deliberate: a hard vertical edge at 120 km/h reads as a crash to the jolt detector in car.gd.
• Roads get dashed centre lines; footway=crossing becomes zebra bars laid flat on the road instead of a raised strip you'd launch off.
• Trees are a trunk plus three offset welded spheres (figs) or radiating fronds (palms), scattered along kerbs on top of the ones OSM maps — Brisbane has far more street trees than are tagged.
• Smashables: the builder drops PP_/WB_ marker empties (kerbside parking + carpark rows from amenity=parking, wheelie bins on footpaths); game.gd fills them at load with shuntable RigidBody fleet cars and council bins (asleep until rammed, skipped in junction mode to keep the puzzles deterministic).
• Brisbane colour: red busway asphalt, jacaranda-purple canopy on ~1 in 5 street trees, Queenslander weatherboard + corrugated iron on building=house footprints, fictional shop-fascia signs above awnings and rooftop billboards (FLUX gibberish lettering on purpose — no real brands).
• Southbank landmarks (hardcoded per level id): the Wheel of Brisbane placed off its mapped ticket office, and the Grand Arbour's curling steel tendrils + bougainvillea following the actual mapped footway.
• Queen Street Mall's winged canopies grow along pedestrian ways whose name starts with the canopy argument. Note OSM splits the mall into a 15 m stub named "Queen Street Mall" plus the 438 m pedestrian way named just "Queen Street", hence prefix matching.

Variation is seeded off OSM ids, so rebuilds are reproducible.

Textures

assets/textures/ is FLUX-generated (Cloudflare Workers AI). Regenerate the whole set with tools/gen_textures.sh or one with tools/gen_textures.sh <name>; creds are read from .env, never printed.

Two things worth knowing before you re-prompt:

• FLUX returns a near-white blank sheet for anything described as pale ("off white metal panel" came back at 240/255 however it was worded), and a blown-out albedo renders as a featureless void in game. The spec table's last column is a target mean luma that clamps this deterministically.
• tools/check_textures.py reports mean/contrast for the set and flags the duds. Run it after regenerating.

The builder box-projects UVs at a per-material metres-per-tile scale; facades pick glass/brick/concrete/heritage/sandstone by height, building tag and id hash.

woolies_carpark is the one level still built in GDScript rather than as a GLB (carpark.gd) — its parked shitboxes have to stay shuntable RigidBodies, which a static GLB can't carry. It picks its parked cars at random from the real fleet. Its Trolley Run junction runs convoys along the aisles at z = 15/12 and z = -21/-24, so keep those lanes clear.

Add a level

Make a folder levels/<id>/ containing level.glb (or level.tscn). Blender convention:

• Solid objects: suffix the name with -col (Godot generates collision on import).
• An Empty named Spawn where the car starts.
• A curve/path named RacePath (loop) enables Race mode and traffic.
• Export glTF Binary to levels/<id>/level.glb. It appears in the menu.

Tests

/Applications/Godot.app/Contents/MacOS/Godot --headless --path . --import
/Applications/Godot.app/Contents/MacOS/Godot --headless --path . --script tests/smoke.gd

Visual check (opens a window, saves a PNG):

/Applications/Godot.app/Contents/MacOS/Godot --path . --script tests/screenshot.gd -- car=datto_120y mode=crash frames=280 out=shot.png

Design doc

docs/BurnoutInfinityShitbox.pdf — research report on the original game. Still to come: crash deformation (control-hull vertex displacement, equations in the PDF), oncoming-lane boost, Road Rage mode, sound, real level GLBs from Blender.