Rockport Chaos: CJ escaped San Andreas and ended up in Most Wanted

It started with a very reasonable question: what if you could get out of the car in Need for Speed: Most Wanted, and the guy getting out was CJ?

That turned into Rockport Chaos, a GTA San Andreas crossover mod for the 2005 PC version of Most Wanted. Rockport keeps its roads, cars, driving, and pursuit system. CJ brings a completely different set of problems to town.

Getting out changes the whole game

The fun part is keeping Most Wanted’s driving and asking what happens when the player stops being a car.

CJ can walk and sprint, enter and steal vehicles, use weapons, take damage, and get wasted. Police have to deal with him on foot as well as behind the wheel. Vehicle impacts depend on speed, and jumping out of a moving car should carry momentum instead of planting him neatly on the pavement.

The weapon experiments have grown beyond a pistol: shotgun spread, automatic weapons, a minigun, and a rocket launcher. Explosions, nearby traffic reactions, pedestrian movement, controller input, and mouse capture have all needed their own rounds of work. There is also an experimental helicopter-stealing system, because apparently leaving this as a driving game was too sensible.

These are custom systems running inside Most Wanted. Matching the feel of San Andreas takes much more than putting CJ’s model on screen, and the mechanics are still being tuned.

Apparently we are making a campaign now

The campaign premise is that CJ gets deported from California to Rockport. Things get less sensible from there.

The test mission is called “MAKE ROCKPORT GREAT AGAIN.” Trump wants a new ride, buys the dealership’s stock, and needs CJ to recover his gold Lamborghini from Razor. For this version, Razor is played by Cesar Vialpando. That decision still makes me laugh.

Under the joke is a mission framework: meet a contact, watch a scene, find the target, recover the car, deal with a pursuit, and return it intact. Failure means going back to the original contact to try again. The first completion pays a reward, with completion recorded separately from the original game save.

I want the cutscenes to happen in the game. The current pass has characters facing each other, taking turns gesturing while their subtitles play, and returning to a listening pose. Prerecorded dialogue could come later; the scenes shown here use subtitles.

The bugs are half the story

Some of the funniest problems have been very specific. A stolen Lamborghini could drive without making engine noise because the game’s sound behavior still belonged to its old AI context. The fix was to rebuild that behavior when the vehicle changes hands.

Talking animations were another one. A partial upper-body animation needs a standing base underneath it. Getting that wrong makes a conversation look considerably less human than intended.

Navigation also needed to follow CJ instead of the car he left behind. The latest pass connects mission objectives to the native minimap and GPS arrow, so the mission feels closer to something that belongs in Most Wanted. San Andreas-style mission result banners provide the other half of the crossover.

Where it stands

This is 0.1 Alpha, with a working mechanics prototype and an early campaign framework. Development happens on Linux with Wine, with Windows testing along the way. The latest mission UI has been checked at 640×480 without Widescreen Fix and at 1920×1080 with it.

Traffic and pedestrian AI, collision edge cases, police balance, animations, and longer play sessions still need attention. Automated checks and staged mission tests help catch regressions; they do not replace playing a whole chase and mission normally.

The goal is a crossover that feels fun to play even after the initial joke wears off. But seeing CJ walk down a Most Wanted street is still funny every time.

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