As you all know I have sent important questions to Igor Belago on November 15, 2008. This is his reply on November 17, 2008. This is the letter translated into English. You can find the original in Russian here.
http://forums.games.1c.ru/index.php?mid=2155332
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Reply from Igor Belago to questions from the Russian 1c forum members.
Good day Yevgeniy!
Thank you and all the other members of the 1C forums for this letter. I will try to answer your questions.
Question: First of all, please tell us what version of Rig'n'Roll was displayed at Igromir 2008? Is this the latest version of the game to date, or is this an old demo/beta version from last year?
Answer: The version, which you saw, was practically the full complete version of
the game. In this version from Igromir, the number of trucks, and other
features was decreased for safety reasons. People who came to the expo could
see that the game had almost no "gray buttons" (meaning deactivated game
controls) also both game modes were accessible, main game and single delivery.
Question: We noticed that there were no pedestrians in the Igromir version of
the game, will there be pedestrians in the final version?
Answer: The pedestrians were removed from the Igromir version because they are still too buggy to show off.
Question: Will regular Al cars also enter gas stations and auto shops (well at least gas stations), since in the videos from Igromir the gas stations were empty?
Answer: We have left this an open question for now. There is still some
instability of the algorithms of the ability to create rush hour traffic near truckstops.
Question: Will AI trucks have trailers?
Answer: Yes they already do. You probably did not see them in the Igromir version
due to the decreased number of AI vehicles, as I said before.
Question: Did you decide 100% that there will be no multiplayer in the final
version of the game, and will you add it later in a patch or something?
Answer: Yes, the final version of the game will not have multiplayer. We hope to
add it later.
Question: In the version of the game at Igromir, the streets looked a little
empty, will the final version of the game have many AI vehicles, pedestrians,
just signs of life?
Answer: I already explained about the pedestrians. The amount of traffic on
the roads is determined by many factors. First of all its determined by the
user. You can select the intensity of the number of AI vehicles and level of
difficulty.
Also the number of lanes, time of day, and quality of the roads
play a role. And finally various events in the game also have an effect, for
example during the truck championship of California, the roads will be cleared
of traffic.
Question: And now we must ask you about the most painful topic for us all, the release date. In your last email, you said the game will be released in 2008. is this still true? Then why does it say 2009 here?
http://www.1cpublishing.eu/game/rig-n-roll/overview
Please try to understand us gamers, and fans of your game series, we are waiting for so many years already.
Answer: First of all, I would like to thank the members of the 1c forums and
fans of our game on behalf of the entire development team for your patience
all these years. I completely understand you, and believe me when I say that
its even more painful for us developers. This is a hard game, and we did not
expect to take this long to develop it at first.
Sadly we can no longer make a 2008 release. The game still has too many bugs
for a release, and the days when we caught 50-70 bugs a day are over. The game
right now is mostly clean (I think the people who went to Igromir could see
this). The bugs which are left are very tricky in character. They are usually
hard to catch.
The number of bugs in the game is falling rapidly, especially with massive manual and automatic testing, but nonetheless all our attempts to predict the rate at which the bugs are eliminated did not lead us to a satisfactory result for a 2008 release. At the current rate of bug elimination, there is still a couple of months of hard work left by developers
and testers,
in other words wait to the beginning of 2009.
Finally I would like to thank the people who were at Igromir 2008 and who
released videos of the game. If we get permission from them, we will
publish these videos on the official game website.
Respectfully yours, Igor Belago