Interview answer:

yuhui2009 · #1 08-13-2009, 06:42 PM

We are making a game where you dou't need to go to the main menu to load a level. This will be a seamless game world, an absolutely free world where you can go to any place you want. We decided to make the game take place in the USA. Why the USA? Because it has more in common with Russia than people think. Firstly,people in both countries have a simmilar mentality. Secondly,Truckers exist in both countries. I mean it's a very big professional segment.

The idea of the game is that a young trucker comes to california, he has a little office and not much money, and decides to expand hia business. He has hired a secretary and bought a second-hand truck. His aim is to make his one of the mayor companies on the freight market of California. As a result he will find friends and enemies.

There are no truckers on our developer's team. We could only find out the specific features of the profession by asking someone else. We found a trucker who let us try out his spot in his truck. By chance three of us got to sit and see it for ourselves. Our feelings were the following:"seats are soft,there is enough space,we can take everything with us we need: a phone,a microwave oven,modem,fax...everything! We also have a minimum of one berth in the cab. We created the truck in the way we wanted it to look. We used high-powered computers and all the calculations took a very long time. As a result we got the image we liked.

Then our programmers with their head, Nikolay Elykov, worked out the engine. From the moment we saw our first truck, where one can see everything including the truck that reflects the real world and changes according to the lighting, sunrise and even rain... at that moment we realized, that we must make this game. This is the feeling of freedom. The freedom in creating interiors and landscape exteriors. lt's not easy to make living colors and a lot of light. We made every detail as realistic as possible, l mean leather and plastic, and if we look closer it's fringes and other little details. We paid a lot of attention to the technology as well.

As we know, it's impossible to do something without shaders. At the beginning of the development we planned for 10 times compression of the game world. This means that we were going to have about 1000 kilometers of real roads. We actually did even better. As result we now have about 2000 kilometers of real roads. This territory includes 40 cities, including Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco and Sacramento.

It's hard to create models of dirty cars in the USA, because one can hardly see such cars there. We added different elements to the cars, l mean polishing, metallic ,chameleons, shadows- we included all these things. As for the dirt, it's hard to find a place on a car where one could draw it and a gamer could notice it. So all the vehicles seem to be the cleanest elements of the game.

The main secrets of creating weather effects such as rain drops on the windscreen and other things were done by means of new technologies and sometime that was the result of creativity from our programmers and designers. Such technologies were simple, but cunning. Finally, when we watched all of these weather effects, and saw how organic they are, we were really glad.

The technique of the hauler handling is absolutely different to the technique of the truck and lorry handling. l mean you need to take into consideration the semitrailer its behavior. its drift is directed to the side opposite to the direction of the turn. lt corresponds with all the physical laws. lf you turn to the left, your trailer skids to the right. lf you go to a highway at a high speed and the highway is fenced, the trailer brushes against the fence. So you need to control the speed.

We developed a damage model and our own physics model. lf a player stops for a moment and looks around, he can see up to 80 cars. Actually, it's a real achievment. Taking into consideration, that each car consists of about 50 000 polygons, there is no computer, that can render them. So we created very complicated intellingence aimed to detalize cars. A player should see the cars, that behave absolutely naturally, that his system can afford. So we created a special intellectual subsystem of traffic management, that dispatches cars and gives them orders to move in some direction. ln effect to follow the US traffic rules, including all the road signs, road interchanges, etc. l really hope that players will appreciate it when they will see it. l mean they will see how this world lives, and that it is a living world.

ln the game as in the real life you can get into jail and this will be the end of the game. You can get into conditions, which are incompatible with life on the road, this will be the end of the game. That is the difference from the previous parts of the game: there are many different endings of the game. You don't have only one alternative where you monopolize the market or you don't. There are many possible positive endings and negative ones as well.

As for the soundtrack, we decided to make it the radio. 1C Company asked us to create Rig'nRoll's soundtrack based on the songs of our band "Aria". lt had to be brutal, modern and exciting, so that the player would want to put the pedal to the metal. l believe that our music fits the spirit of the game perfectly.