Obviously there were some amazing physics hacks to make it possible at all to drive a car over the sorts of extreme slopes (and extreme changes in slope) from S

Obviously there were some amazing physics hacks to make it possible at all to drive a car over the sorts of extreme slopes (and extreme changes in slope) from SimCity 2000 maps, where the ground was always either completely flat or else a 45 degree upward slant. IMHO the physics folks did an amazing job in trying to paper over all those problems, but there was one known driving physics bug that I'm pretty sure we never managed to fix, and it was this: Setup: in SimCity 2000, put a railroad track adjacent to a road so that the two are parallel with each other. Have them travel flat, then up a slope, and then flat again. Loading the map into Streets, drive your car so that two of its wheels (either the left wheels or the right wheels) are on the road, and the other two are on the railroad tracks. Now drive as quickly as you can, keeping your wheels on the two different surfaces. Everything seems fine until you crest the hill at the top, at which point the various physics hacks trying to keep a vehicle from bottoming out as it goes over the hill compound with each other catastrophically, and the car gets launched into the air like a rocket; flying high into the air and super fast, typically wrapping around the entire world a half dozen times before finally coming back down far enough to hit anything. RE: the DLLs, I don't remember the reasoning for separate DLLs for the weapons, but it was kind of amazing for our LAN sessions; you could create your own weapon as a DLL and it'd just work in the networked games even if your opponents didn't have it (since your client is authoritative over your own projectiles), and they could use any art asset available to the rest of the game. I remember in particular one LAN session where one of the programmers had made a custom weapon which just caused a mayor statue to smash down from the sky, instantly destroying their foe. You'd never get away with leaving those sorts of holes open in a networked game these days; in retrospect it was ripe for all sorts of abuse. (I don't know whether they hardened that at all before shipping the game, but it was a different era back then)