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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?
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.
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?
Q: What other hardware equipment are you using for the simulator and how did you manage to connect it with 3DGS?
Q: What types of weather conditions are you going to have in your project?
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?
Q: Are you using some special techniques to increase the frame rate in your cities? Please share some of them with us.
Q: Please give us a few tips for the beginners.
Thank you a lot, Kazim. |