Sunday, June 12, 2011

Trucks & Trailers graphics stress test

The game should start appearing on the store shelves towards the end of next week, and we were contemplating what to put here on the blog to further promote it. We have shown a lot already, you may already be too tired to appreciate another set of regular run-of-the-mill screenshots after seeing so many various scenes from the game and the recent gameplay video.

So we thought we would show you something quite different, something that would be in line with the motto of this blog - to show you things "behind the scenes" and "under the hood" as they happen during development.

So here is a very short video with footage from a graphics stress test that we did to understand how putting animated pedestrians into the scene will influence graphics performance.

Keep in mind though that staying within desired graphics performance is only one aspect of having people in our games. We need to address the problems of developing believable AI code for pedestrians, and gameplay consequences of potentially putting them into areas where the player's vehicle could hit them.

In Trucks & Trailers, we used the simplest solution of having pedestrians in the game only as a sort of decoration, putting them only into areas not accessible by the player's truck. Implementing pedestrians in our future games remains an open question.