That car shading is fantastic (cool music btw).

I just noticed in the videos that the road had no specular/gloss map. That would improve its look a lot.

Thanks man!

Yea, I could just multiply the specular by the detail map at the very least. Problem is I'm doing 3 levels of specular and adding them together ( I love HDR ), but it does look a bit odd, I know what you're talking about.

I should just do normal mapping on the road, though it might look odd with only normal mapping applied to the roads.

You're spending a helluva lot of time on the graphics. Aren't you concerned that your AI and simulation is going to suffer?

- street signals
- car/truck/motorcyle traffic and AI pathfinding and steering
- police behavior
- gang behavior
- pedestrian behavior
- general steering without walking through each other
- police on foot behavior
- gang members on foot behavior
- special behaviors for key AI characters

etc.


Or have you done any AI and simulation work yet?

Yea I've already coded all of that stuff up...2-3 iterations in some cases [ traffic AI], AI is a lot of fun to code up anyways. I've been working on that stuff for years...scroll back to 2005 and read all about my AI / simulation coding. I've implemented 4 physics engines into the game as well, over the years.

I'm going completly out of my way to provide 3 levels of detail for every visual aspect of the scene, so it will work on all GPUs that support PS 2.0 and HDR render targets. My graphical requirements are no more demanding than any decent looking commercial game out there [ and I'm releasing in 6 months ].

I guess the reason it seems I'm only working on graphics is because I'm undergoing a complete rewrite of the game engine and all art assets, since I made the mistake of undershooting my art asset quality 3 years before the game's release.

I'm in the process of re-connecting everything since the visual upgrade, I have 150,000+ lines of code for all the AI/simulation/rendering/etc. Also since the game is centered around a multiplayer experience, I really just have to code bots...it's not that hard given some of the limitations of my game world. The pathfinding is trivial since all I have to do is resolve it on a tile basis, the logic behind that is where things get interesting, and I'll stay up and code that stuff for hours on end...