City Car Driving Stunt Master

Setting Up and Running Stunt Mods in City Car Driving

City Car Driving is a training-focused sim that never really had official stunt content. People figure that out pretty quickly and start patching their own physics tweaks, collision models, and camera rigs into the base installation. What you end up with is unofficially called City Car Driving Stunt Master in a lot of forums, and it is basically a collection of community mods stitched together so you can do burnouts, drift holds, and controlled slides without the default AI traffic constantly T-boning you. I installed my first version back when the base sim was still on v1.7.3. The stunt stack itself has gone through a dozen revisions since then, and the one thing that never changed is that it requires you to manually manage dependencies between the physics override, the AI removal patch, and the camera script. Skip one and the car either sinks into the ground or the drift input deadlocks entirely.

What City Car Driving Stunt Master Actually Does

The core package replaces three things: the default tire friction curve, the AI vehicle spawner, and the steering feedback values. The tire curve is the big one. In the vanilla sim the front tires are modeled to understeer almost immediately once you break traction, which makes the car behave like a grocery cart at 60 km/h. The stunt patch rebalances that curve so you can hold the rear end out while still steering. It is not arcade-like. You still have to manage throttle and angle by hand, but the car responds to it instead of fighting you. The AI removal patch is separate. By default the game spawns traffic inside the stunt zones, which means your time lapses get ruined by a van cutting across your line. The patch disables the spawner in predefined areas. I found that the patch occasionally fails to load if you run the game from a shortcut instead of the main executable, which is why the install guide always says to run setup.exe from the root folder first.

Installation Walkthrough

You need the base City Car Driving game, a clean install with no prior mod conflicts, and about 20 minutes. Here is the sequence that actually works without breaking save data. First, back up your UserDocuments save folder. The path is usually Documents/FakeWorld/CityCarDriving/. Copy the whole folder somewhere else. You will need it if the physics override corrupts one of your custom car profiles. Download the City Car Driving Stunt Master archive from the main distribution thread. There are mirror links everywhere, but the thread starter reuploads a fresh checksum after each update. Verify it. I wasted an afternoon on a corrupted mirror before I started checking SHA-1 sums against the pinned post.

Extract the archive to a temporary folder. Do not extract directly into the game directory. The package contains nested folders with identical names, and if you extract in-place the installer overwrites the wrong files. I learned that the hard way after a missing DLL error sent me reinstalling the base game twice. Run the included install script. It copies the modified Physics.dll, the AI override patch, and the camera script into the correct subfolders. It also edits a config file that controls spawn radius and friction coefficients. If the script reports a path error, check that your game folder does not contain spaces in the name. The script splits paths on space characters and gets confused. Launch the game. Load any city map. The stunt zones are usually marked with a small overlay icon in the top right. Drive to one. The first time I ran the patch I thought it was broken because the car felt completely dead on input. That was because the default test car, the Skoda Felicia, still had its stock weight distribution. I switched to the modified sedan profile and the drift behavior clicked immediately.

Troubleshooting the Common Failure Modes

There are four problems I hit repeatedly enough that I keep a cheat sheet open in Notepad. The first is input deadlocking during sustained drifts. If you hold full lock and full throttle for more than eight seconds, the steering value saturates the input handler and the car locks straight. The workaround is to roll the steering back to neutral every three seconds while maintaining throttle. It breaks the saturation cycle without killing the slide. The second is the AI reappearing after a scene reload. The spawn patch hooks into the scene loader, but if you reload a checkpoint the hook sometimes detaches. The fix is a manual reload of the config file from the in-game settings menu, not restarting the whole game. That takes about twelve seconds and saves you from losing five minutes of setup.

The third is the camera clipping through the hood during low-angle drifts. The package includes a camera override script, but it conflicts with any third-party FOV mod you might already have installed. If your view is distorted, disable any existing camera mods first, then apply the stunt master camera script as the only override. The fourth is the most boring one: crashes on startup after a Windows update. The game relies on a specific DirectX runtime bundled in the installation folder. A system update sometimes replaces the shared DLL with a newer version that is incompatible. The fix is to reinstall the DXRedist folder inside the game directory after any major OS patch. That has saved me more hours than anything else on this list.

What the Patch Actually Allows You to Do

The stunt pack lets you perform controlled drifts, handbrake turns, and stop-turns on the standard city maps. It does not add new maps or new cars. It changes how the existing ones behave at the limit. I have done sustained 360-degree spins, figures of eight, and tight donuts in the parking lots and wide intersections without the game fighting me. It is worth being clear about what it does not do. There is no score system, no replay export built in, no stunt timing leaderboards. If you want to record sessions you need external software. The frame pacing is fine for capture at 60fps, but the game drops frames on busy intersections even with AI disabled because the lighting calculation is unchanged. For what it is, the City Car Driving Stunt Master setup is practical. It turns a corporate driving trainer into something you can actually practice car control in. The learning curve is steep, the installation requires patience, and the crash surface is real enough that you will reset progress several times before it feels smooth. It does what it claims. It just demands that you read the instructions in order.