|
Cybernet |
  |
Guru
Déconnecté
Niveau : 5
N° de Membre :
1542
Ancienneté : 100%
Participation : 13%
Inscription: 08 May 2002
Localisation: Sydney
Messages: 11326
Sujets Lancés : 299
|
 [PREVIEW/PC] Racing Legends : mythe ou réalité ?
Ce jeu, en developpement depuis des années, d'abord sous le nom de World Sport Cars, puis maintenant de Racing Legends a fait coulé beaucoup d'encre.
Il se veut la simulation ultime, le must du must, mais malheureusement, on ne sait pas grand chose encore du jeu, et certains croivent qu'il ne sortira jamais.
le site officiel :
http://www.west-racing.com
Alors, pour donner signe de vie, Chris, un des developpeurs, vient de déclarer tout cela 
Citation:
Chris, from the West brothers, gives us an update on Racing Legends, including why the WSC project failed, and why there is often so little news about Racing Legends.
Sorry
Okay, everyone can get back up off the floor now, hell hasn't frozen over (though it sure feels like it). And no, your eyes do not deceive you, an infamous West Brother is actually posting in the forum.
First thing, for what it may be worth, 'Sorry' for the lack of postings and news. It probably doesn't help, but we do mean it. Secondly, some form of explanation again for what it's worth.
Let's start in the beginning with WSC. Some people in the forum have commented on the lack of news, reminding them of the last days of WSC and perhaps RL is going the same. Why? Well no it isn't going that way at all, quite the opposite. During WSC we were working on something we had a great passion for and we were very keen to share what we were working on with people who maybe interested, since as we were developing the title for a publisher and being fully aware of the commercial success of titles such as GPL we felt the only way we would be able to complete WSC to the level we wanted was to get the community interested and vocal so that the publisher would run with the game. At the start WSC was meant to be a Lemans sim consisting of one track and a collection of cars, a manageable project. Though as time went by, we were required to change this working spec. An extra track here, another couple of cars there and along with whole tracks having to be thrown in the bin for various reasons, the size of the project grew and grew without the possibility of extra people being hired. Added to this, was a poor decision to develop WSC as a Glide title, which meant a lengthy conversion to DX, after the death of 3dfx, all meaning WSC turned into the never-ending project, much to everyone's frustration, developer, publisher and community.
In the early days, Tony and I were free to talk about the game and we sent out screen shots and chatted about the title at any opportunity. As I said, to try and show to the publisher an interest for what we were trying to do. But this didn't fit with normal ways of doing things and we were asked to stop.
After the ending of WSC, we decided that we still wanted to do the title we have always wanted to write. So instead of accepting jobs elsewhere or other offers, we decided to go it alone and start from scratch on an all new title, thus, RL was born. We now could do what we wanted with no one in the way. We knew we would need the help of real teams, real car owners and drivers, so before the 2002 Festival of Speed, we prepared an information pack highlighting what we were attempting to produce, which we could hand to teams and owners at the event. Obviously, part of the info pack had the www.west-racing.com url so we reproduced parts of the pack on our website. Part of that meant changing the under construction page, and it surprised us once we did that, we got an email or two noticing the change. We had long since thought no one bothered to check the site.
Anyway, the next day Tony decided to change the watermark on the fence for a car he liked more, and as a bit of fun, we changed the number to the number of days until the festival. It wasn't meant to be any grand countdown; it was just some fun. On checking the webstats after the first day of the site being opened, we were again surprised at how many people did check the site out. The site was never intended to be a news type site, it was just meant to be a copy of the info in the packs in case a driver etc. came to visit. This goes for the forum as well, which was purely there for people who did get a pack to post questions, car info, pictures etc. It was never meant to a public forum. So we were surprised when someone found the rather obvious url and announced the forum to one and all. We should have closed it then in hindsight but didn't, and here we are now.
So why don't we post more often? Well it's simply that there isn't anything to post about. We understand people are very keen to find out anything they can about what's going to be in RL, when it going to be done, how much is going to cost, when can they beta test etc etc etc. It's just not possible to answer most of these questions at the current time. What we can answer is in the FAQ's, but after that it's not possible to say what spec machine you will need to get 30fps, or what cars will be in the first release and so on. We also don't want at the moment to say how we are doing certain things.
You may or may not be surprised to hear I am not the world's fastest coder, but that doesn't mean I don't write code quickly, because I do. I do work on things until they are finished though, and do not start work on something else until its been fully worked out how it will work and link in with other systems. After that, I will often rewrite a system, not once, but twice to make sure it's as good as I can get it. I also do not code up demos or things that are not needed, as it's more important to me to have the systems working, all the boring stuff doing its bits, before I go for all the eye candy. There is not a lot of point doing just a rendering engine that looks great and shifts a few million polys a second, only to have to redo it because all the memory managers and resource handlers don't do what you need. Also, RL is designed to be expandable and to grow as the sim requires it, so each system needs to accepts plugins to expand its functionality, which makes things a little more complex.
Tony is the same with his modeling, he doesn't start a model until he has hundreds of pictures of all parts of the cars, has blueprints to work from and a complete set of measurements (that goes for buses as well). Although, he doesn't knock out cars as fast as Jure and Ricardo, there is a lot more that has to go into the cars in design of the model which isn't needed if being done purely for rendering purposes. The cars also need to be built to work with the 3d engine in the best way possible, making materials match textures, applying extra maps for extra shader info, collisions info etc, as well as full rigging. As Tony says often we arnt interested in doing RL as quick as possible but as good as possible.
We can understand people's interest and desire to know more about what's being worked on, but we just aren't ready to show a vast amount of what we are doing just now. There are various reasons for this, ranging from not having permission to show stuff (we are a commercial product and so aren't quite as free to post images of every car or track unlike free projects) to the fact we just do not want to show how we are doing something. We are a small team with some neat ideas for stuff, but showing those can give bigger teams the chance to beat us to it.
We are kinda in a no win situation really. When we did do updates more often, we got emails (more than we do when we don't update actually) telling us be quiet and stop stealing the attention away from other products. If we don't do updates, we don't care about you guys (not true). I guess there's a happy medium somewhere, but the honest fact is doing the work is the most important thing to us at the moment. We have to get this project done as soon as we can. As it is, Tony only gets about 4 full days in 7 to actually do modeling, having to deal with all the other bits that running a company requires, paperwork, accountants, meetings research etc. I know it doesn't sound like much to spend 30mins a day checking the forums and posting a few replies, but that adds up to 20 working days each in a year. As it is, it used to take Tony a day to do the web update (no we aren't web page masters at all). The time will come when there will be more updates, pictures and videos than you will know what to do with, but that time is not now. We won't be posting any ingame shots until we are 100% happy with them and that they truly represent the final quality.
Some other points I would like to mention. Yes RL will require some serious resources to get every detail out of it. I make no apologies for this, RL has been written to take full advantage of the latest hardware that's available and will be available. We are adding as much detail as we can to the cars and tracks so it's there for people who want to see it. We are using quite a few fancy rendering techniques, some not used before in games on the PC (well until HL2 comes along anyway) and although not everyone will be able to run all the detail and all the effects at the same time, some will. RL is designed to be added to and we hope to get many years enjoyment out of it as we gradually improve and update it. So over time, people will expand their hardware and RL will expand into that hardware. We feel it's better to have the chance of displaying the detail rather than it not being there in the first place.
Another point I saw was the idea that people were concerned that the silence until now would somehow be reflected in a total lack of support for RL once we get something out. The fact is, the lack of news is purely down to us working every hour of every day on RL and not letting anything get in the way of work. So far from being a bad sign for future support, I can only see it that we are fully devoted to making RL as good as we possibly can. It seems a little absurd that after trying for many years to achieve an aim and selling everything one owns to achieve that aim, that once we actually had a chance of seeing some return on the hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in the title we would just walk away and forget about it.
Anyway I've bored you enough, I hope I've shed some light on the workings of a West Brothers mind, nothing we do is intended to offend or annoy anyone. We value the interest you have all shown in the project greatly. We just throw ourselves into the work and forget about everything else going on to get this out as soon as we can so you can actually make your own minds up about what we are attempting. And as Tony has said before no one really has anything to lose but us, if we dont get RL Iam sure there will be many more sims along to fill its spot, but we are at least trying to make something special and something that people may enjoy, and that surely has to better than not trying at all, even if it fails. And although some of the hostility towards us is no doubt down to the lack of news about the project, it does seem as if some people even resent us trying to do RL. And to those that say you only need to look at the past to see what will happen, well thats only true if you dont bother to learn from the past.
All right, I think I've still got a few hundred thousand lines of code to do by bedtime so I'll leave it there for now. Thank you for your time.
Chris
|
Signaler ce message à un modérateur | IP: Logguée
Temps en ligne : 44 Jours, 0 Heure, 59 Minutes, 46 Secondes en ligne
|
10-02-2004 23:24
)
