Interviews

Harro Besier, one of the brains behind the "Driving Academy" series has launched a new game. Read the interview to find out more about it.

Q: How many copies of your Driving Academy games did you sell until now?

A: We sell the 3D Driving School in 4 countries, targeting retail stores: Germany, France, Belgium, and Netherlands. If we include worldwide online sales we have sold more than 125.000 units until now.

Q: What are the new features that were introduced in the second version of the Driving Academy?

A: Actually we already work on the fourth edition. After the first edition we included new international cities, as well as a bigger highway. For London we took 700 pictures on a two day trip. We now know how to make good photos and convert them into proper textures. For our third edition motorbikes and cars with transparent glasses have been modeled. We also tried our first big terrain level - a country road. The fourth edition will have even more cars and special vehicles like the Quad; additionally, the GUI will get an Xp look alike. The driving simulator will be combined with other windows programs, so some face lifting is necessary. If the project continues to grow we will include new cities too: Amsterdam and Gent. Gent is a historical city which we modeled for our new police game " Flikken".

Q: Your city levels are big and look really good; how did you manage to keep a good frame rate?

A: We did some extra programming to keep a good frame rate. Each few seconds we measure the frame rate and vary the clipping range and clipping distance accordingly. If these values fall below a minimum we

reduce parts from our vehicles or remove complete vehicles and pedestrians which are not necessary for the story. We didn't use LOD because it turned out to be difficult to provide different sets of textures for the vehicles (and we have many different vehicles). We are calculating our own LOD. For example, cars seen in a longer distance won't have wheels and glasses.

Q: How big is your team now?

A: We are 3 guys.

Q: Can you tell us a few words about Flikken, your new game project?

A: Flikken is a famous TV series in Belgium which runs in the 6th season actually. They wanted to have a racing game with an "educational character". So the idea was to use our driving school together with an intelligent fleeing car algorithm for a race. Driving properly in a police car leads to collecting points. After collection enough points you can turn on a navigation system where you can find usual elements of 3D-games: compass, map, helicopter camera and a scrolling story board. You get a mission through your local radio to catch a fleeing car, e.g. after a bank robbery. You may put on your siren and try to stop this gangster car. With the siren turned on everything will be allowed. The fleeing car tries to escape from you in an intelligent way. It makes U-turns, runs over pedestrian walks, etc. The original actors in the TV series gave us the right to use their voices, and we have built in over 600 different takes in ogg-format. The scenery is historical Gent, the biggest city level we have ever made. Unfortunately we could only compile it as a "fast build". I tried to use the compiler in full build mode but I had to stop the building process after waiting for a week. The police game will be an exclusive feature of our next edition of the 3D-driving simulator.

Q: What would you need to see implemented in the engine in the near future?

A: There will be a big need to use high polygon models with lots of lighting effects for our cars. Additionally force feedback has to be a built in functionality of the game-engine (third party DLLs don't work correctly). 3DGS is on a good way - they stress online functionality more and more. I hope that there will be a powerful way to link many users within 3DGS in a network. We'd like to make a multiplayer version of our game at the end of the year. And here is my dream: please port it to X-Box, Linux, and Apple-OS.

Q: Can you recommend a few freeware or cheap applications that you consider to be extremely useful for game development?

A: The only thing we are using (which is cheaper) is the installer "Create Install Light". The link is already placed in your link list. For good results you will need 3D-Studio and Photoshop, sorry about that ;-)

Q: Please give us a few tips for the beginners.

A: The most important thing to remember is that you are making a software project in any case. Respond to the following questions before starting:

- What is the objective of your game?

- What makes your game unique compared to other games on earth?

- Which skills do you need and what is missing?

- How long will it take you to create the game (and then multiply the time by 3)?

And a few tips:

- Don't copy - make everything by yourself; otherwise you will never know if you have violated a copyright law.

- Don't be afraid of learning programming. C-script is a fine and easy way to start.

- Come to an end!

- Don't try to make it perfect.

- Never give up! You are not the first guy failing a software project.

Thank you a lot, Harro.