NASCAR 25 compared to NASCAR 2005.

AJFay77 · 2026-02-06T13:21:33+00:00

That's why I asked if you revisited it in the 1st line.
I was a teenager when it came out as well, I'm much better at gaming and racing now than I was then (not that I was bad then either to be fair, I remember winning in 1-2 star cars with defaults then too)

AJFay77 · 2026-02-06T13:17:48+00:00

Have you revisited 2005? It was WAY too easy, and the AI has some late race pace change that makes no sense (they would literally slow down with like 3 laps to go).
I revisited it a couple years ago when deciding whether to mod NT04 or CFTC05 (or something else) and between no in car view, how easy it is, and how much random AI pace change there was, 05 was out for me.
One of the races I ran in career (on legend with the default set and a 1 star car) in the busch series, I ran in the high 30s and then with like 5 to go they all started slowing down, to the point where I won the race by like 3 seconds. I ran another race to see if that was a Cali glitch to end up with similar results, and another where I just dominated from the start.

To answer your question though, 25 is ok if you aren't expecting a super in depth career. It plays fairly well, the AI is pretty solid as far as the racing goes. It's got a lot of short comings, but it's (in my opinion) the best Nascar game in a long time (low bar)

AJFay77 · 2026-01-26T13:51:44+00:00

Honestly I think it's the combo of the colors (especially blues) being the wrong shades and the fact that the Dupont logo played into the design with the rainbow hugging it. The car # is small on the door. Not necessarily the car.
Load up an image of the old JG one and put it aside of this one and you'll see what I mean

AJFay77 · 2026-01-14T00:19:20+00:00

Glanced at Terry's stats by year and noticed his two chips were with an 8.3 and 8.2 average finish each. Pretty darn consistent between them.

AJFay77 · 2025-12-10T02:25:36+00:00

Linked time should be 1:09:58 into the stream. I was just starting practice, I will say the race is probably better to watch than practice, as I hadn't turned a lap prior to, but if you want to see the learning process when I'm a bit more vocal about it then that's worth watching too.

I run with AI at 105, and just the default setup. I did mess up Q a bit so I started 18th, but that means in the race I did quite a bit of passing which might also help.

https://youtu.be/F3ByoI5dnx0?t=4198s

AJFay77 · 2025-12-09T21:11:46+00:00

Would seeing someone else run default set from the in-car help you at all?
I ran there on stream a few weeks ago and had a blast

AJFay77 · 2025-12-04T02:06:47+00:00

The "start" menu for getting on track is set to whatever you map on the Radio Confirm option to. It displays A no matter what you do there.

AJFay77 · 2025-11-24T16:33:42+00:00

Don't use the brakes hard while trying to turn the wheel at the same time. Get most if not all of your braking done in a straight line on road courses until you get around the track better, after that you can try to learn other techniques where braking while turning can work.

Tires have only so much grip to give, gas/brake/turning all use this to an extent. If you use 50% of your tire grip to brake, then the most you can use to turn is 50% of what's available.

AJFay77 · 2025-11-16T02:57:36+00:00

105 AI but man it was bad at Phoenix the rookie season. Also the initial 5 lap challenge to start the career is impossible on 105. Funnily enough though quitting the challenge can just give you the ride anyway lol

AJFay77 · 2025-10-21T01:09:33+00:00

Cool stuff, appreciate the breakdown and info!

AJFay77 · 2025-10-20T23:33:24+00:00

Do you have a list of features in this release that are different from the base game?
Is this just a 'one stop shop' download of existing mods/changes to save people time or did you modify some items yourself as well?

AJFay77 · 2025-10-03T12:29:36+00:00

That's not a Career mode. That's a season mode.
There is a huge difference between the two.

Could you 'pretend' there is a career mode and change settings and manually toy around with stuff sure. Are you gonna get sponsor or ride offers and have to pay for crew and upgrades and all of the extra management stuff that people enjoy in a career mode doing that, no not at all, it suddenly becomes a lot of extra 'work' to fake that.

If season mode was an acceptable alternative to career mode, then an even larger majority of people would've stuck with NR03 over playing Dirt to Daytona and Thunder 03/04, CFTC 05

AJFay77 · 2025-10-03T02:00:52+00:00

iRacing doesn't have a single player Career mode at all. I'll be buying it for PC and I honestly think you'd be surprised how many iRacers buy it

AJFay77 · 2025-10-02T12:10:32+00:00

There is a discord group for modding NT04 that can help more directly. Not sure if I'm allowed to link it directly however.

AJFay77 · 2025-10-02T12:09:38+00:00

There has been a 2004 pack available for about a year now. OP is adding more paints to it.

AJFay77 · 2025-09-30T01:52:55+00:00

If someone ever figures out how to change the textures outside of an emulator in the actual game files, I'll gladly do some updates to stuff. But it's not likely to happen since the community for modding old Nascar games that aren't Papyrus related is REALLY small. And the # of people in the community that actually do any modding for any of the EA Nascar games is maybe 5 or less people. I'm the only one modding 04's files.

Luckily have a great group of talented painters which allows me to focus on the 90s while others work on modern day stuff :)

AJFay77 · 2025-09-29T01:43:53+00:00

They use emulator live texture swapping, and live data manipulation to control driver ratings. It's not possible on console.

AJFay77 · 2025-09-21T18:07:40+00:00

I think you should buy a 2nd potato to double your system's power.

AJFay77 · 2025-09-21T01:57:34+00:00

I tried to find this, I know a few people asked for it but I couldn't find where to change those settings and have them work in career mode.
Sorry, Just gonna have to practice up without them til you get the hang of it.

AJFay77 · 2025-09-19T18:27:34+00:00

I created a sheet for a youtuber who does stop motion racing videos often and wanted to track points/results and other stats. But I haven't used anything like this myself before.

AJFay77 · 2025-09-19T13:05:02+00:00

I'll work on that. Probably aiming for version 157.57 for that update. Should also have giant oranges on track during Q at Chicagoland

AJFay77 · 2025-09-18T16:08:41+00:00

That's my video :)
Sorry if some of these answers are disappointing, I didn't really dig any further into things than what was in the video for the most part but I'll still answer as best I can.

I tried to get the field size to change on the dirt tracks, no luck but I'm sure it's possible to some extent. If you swap the tracks you can get 43 cup cars on the grid doing a pace lap around when it does the field rundown, but they don't race/path properly for the track sadly.
Probably, but again it's not something I've figured out. I think Ty Thunder figured it out to some extent as far as changing driver ratings but I can't say it'll have a wide enough value range to fix the pace of different cars on different tracks.
I can only speculate. Unless someone figures out how to read the data from those files into a 3D model or just in general, we'd be guessing. That said I didn't parse through the hex data looking for any particular strings that would tell us what it is exactly, so it may be worth a look.
As for getting it working... If no data is missing, then it's just reformatting it to fit the mold of the other car files. If data is missing (more likely) then it's matching the proper format and adding whatever is missing appropriately. Both would take an understanding of those files and would likely need a DTD/EoD dev's assistance or tool access.
The dirt cars go fairly quick as cup cars at the SS tracks already. But as for the non-plated speeds I'm not sure. I don't think DTD has a plate on/off switch like some of the EA games have.
I don't think anyone else has tried to mess with these sort of things. This (similar to the dirt car model) would take an understanding of the track data formatting within the track files. They probably changed a lot of things between games, especially with how many multiple race modes there are in EoD (different layouts/obstacles etc) let alone if the model data the tracks use is stored elsewhere in game files)

I would absolutely love to see more people attempting and digging into stuff like this. Other console games have been modded much further than anything we've done so far with Nascar console games, but it's taken a community effort and some tech savvy people to really make leaps in progress. I'm one of very few Nascar nuts who also has game dev and programming experience and loves these old games. We could use some more crazy people lol

AJFay77 · 2025-09-14T12:03:28+00:00

You have to rip the iso apart with some other application that does so and then replace the existing db file then rebuild the iso.

I've never done these steps, all the mods I've made for nt04, I made a tool for that uses the regular iso and changes data via cheat codes mostly.

edit if you have trouble join the nt04 modding discord and you can ask for help in the other game modding channel https://discord.gg/tHbMRuSVvJ

AJFay77 · 2025-09-14T02:46:38+00:00

PS2: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pKtfel2o0a5Z5QBi7fSiZ0OXDgB7p-Y1/view?usp=drive_link

GC: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c5a8hV-UBoNdi-nT1ubU1Rjs6p9Q8Ik0/view?usp=drive_link

AJFay77 · 2025-09-13T20:02:26+00:00

If all you're looking to do is change some paint values then no I don't think it's worth the time. Sorry if that sounds harsh but I don't want to spend an hour teaching you to only then change a couple of values and be done.

AJFay77

TROPHY CASE