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Kazim Kargi, the brain behind Simmobil, kindly took the time to answer my questions.

 

Q: What are the main differences between your automobile simulator and its competition?
A: There are 3 categories: hardware, software and cost.

 

1) We have created a complex piece of hardware which has a cabinet like a real car; it has a steering wheel which can turn nearly 500 degrees to a direction, just like a real car, for a total of nearly 1000 degrees turning angle. It has wipers, signal and headlight arms whish are original spare parts of a car that is built in Turkey; it also has original contact and keys. Other parts are gear, accelerating pedal, brake pedal, clutch pedal which were all produced especially for our product. All mechanical parts have electrical and electronic instruments which are combined in an electronics circuit which is connected to the pc. Our cabinet design and full real mechanic parts make our product special; other products have no cabinet. Some are really good and use a real car for realism but it is impossible to use real car for our target customers because of the costs. We use a special touch pad which is integrated to cabinet to control the menu; it's easier to use than the buttons and we didn't want to use a mouse and a keyboard. Also the monitor is integrated, and you can't see its borders; the screen can be a 19" or 23" TFT or CRT, or a 22" wide TFT-LCD TV.

 

2) The biggest advantage over the competition is traffic density. You can change the density of the traffic between 0% and 100%, which means really hundreds of cars created in traffic and parking at the same time. The driver waits in front of a traffic light because of the queue. Parked car density, moving car density, pedestrian density can be set separately. Weather condition variety is another difference. We made 6 different weather conditions: sunny, sunny and rainy, rainy, foggy, rainy and snowy and snowy. When you select snowy, all of the textures change to add more realism. On the other hand you can select the density of the rain, fog and snow, who can change from 0% to 100%; on 100% fog the viewing distance is nearly zero like in the real world. You can also have icy roads which cause sliding. You can use normal tires or snow tires and even chains for snowy weather and icy ground. Night and day alternates, enabling the drivers to test themselves under different circumstances.
Simmobil has 4 tracks and all of them has these combinations. You can select the first track with sunny weather, 0% traffic, 0%pedestrians, 0% fog, obtaining a level that is easy, or you can select the third
track (city) with snowy weather, at night, with 100% traffic, 100% pedestrians, 100% fog, %100 snow, icy ground and try to drive that way.

 

3) Cost: with all these features we will sell our simulator very cheap. It is the commercial factor which makes Simmobil stand up.

 

Q: How big (in quants) is a regular level?
A: Simmobil has 4 tracks which have 2, 10, 25 and 80 kilometers. The first track is for practice, the second and third are the city levels and the fourth is a motorway which is really long and takes a lot of time.

 

Q: What other hardware equipment are you using for the simulator and how did you manage to connect it with 3DGS?
A: Simmobil has real car mechanics and data collector electronics as explained above. We made a plugin dll at first, but we have changed the electronics now and we are using standard methods to collect data, using plain C-Script.

 

Q: What types of weather conditions are you going to have in your project?
A: We are going to have six weather conditions, each one of them with its own settings and combinations. This makes a huge number but we can say that we've got six main weather types.
 
Q: How many cars and pedestrians are you using in a medium-sized level?
A: Our car and pedestrian number is dynamic; it changes depending on the user. We are always creating and destroying models at runtime, outside the view. All of the cars and pedestrians are created dynamically and use random rules: random paths near the user, random coordinates, random models, random horns and so on. There are nearly 30 paths in the third track to make the world look really random.

 

Q: How do you keep all the cars in sync, making sure that they don't collide with each other, or with player's car?
A: All the cars are scanning each other, the traffic lights and the player. When they see each other, the wait for the other car to pass and than they continue their movement. This has created a natural queue in front of the traffic lights without extra code.

 

Q: Are you using some special techniques to increase the frame rate in your cities? Please share some of them with us.
A: This was the main problem. We have used several techniques to make the levels runnable. We only show the viewable cars; we have used use c_move to move the models, but now we have replaced it with our movement code which has increased the frame rate. We have used clip_far. We did not use LOD.

 

Q: Please give us a few tips for the beginners.
A: Be patient and explore the documentation and examples. Learn the terms; it is very important. What is LOD? What is clip_far? What is a model, fps, world, sky and so on? If you know the keywords and what they do, your problems will be solved much faster.

 

Thank you a lot, Kazim.