Can you see the Ghosts?

We're very excited about the look and feel in Auto Crisis. We've been spending a lot of time tweaking everything, and we're getting closer to perfection.

Here are some of the things we like a lot:

• The camera follows the car like a hot air balloon in a rubber band. Looks very nice.
• Cars are made a bit larger to add to the cartoonish look.
• The film grain and vignette makes a huge difference for a movie feeling.
• The theme music by our composer Tony Palm is great! Listen to a cut down version here.
  

The game will offer two different modes:
1. Work your way to the top by beating the better AI opponents in each race. You will be able to use their cars and face even better opponents. Pick up powerups to shoot them down while you're racing.

2. Single player time attack. Best result can be stored online. It means that as you're playing, you'll see ghost cars showing your personal best, and results from other players.

Here are screenshots of the ghost drivers. What do you think?

Texture Compression Artifacts

We are developing mainly for the iPhone/iPod touch, which use PVRTC texture compression. With the massive textures we use, we really need compression. The ground alone use 16 512x512 and 12 256x256 textures. On top of that, there are some 5 1024x1024 textures for the buildings and trees.

Unfortunately, line art (wich is basically what our ground textures are) gives pretty bad compression artifacts with PVRTC. Especially the borders of textures gets messed up, as you can see in the screenshot below.


There is clearly visible seam just behind the car, and another right after the house. You can also see some pink/green noise, particularly where the shadows of the trees fall on the road.

Without the compression, the ground looks absolutely smooth with crisp edges and no seams. I tried running the game without compression, but even with 16 bit textures, the game just wouldn't run smoothly.

It turns out the texture compression tool shipped with the SDK has a few options not accessible from inside Unity. I'd really like to play around with those, but it doesn't seem like there's any straight-forward way to actually use them anyway. Oh, well.

I guess we could get rid of the seams if we didn't use the last few pixels close to the texture border. We will probably try that in the final release. Right now, there are other, higher priority issues (like some actual gameplay) we need to deal with.

First Complete Level Baked and Running in Unity

After weeks of hard work we finally have a near-final level for testing and tweaking. All static geometry is textured/lightmapped from high-resolution textures.

We use Blender for all modeling and lightmapping, meaning we can bake very high quality lightmaps with soft shadows and ambient occlusion.

The ground is painted with Illustrator and Photoshop, while all other surfaces have a single color. This gives us a fresh, cartoonish air to the game, that fits well with the realistic lighting.

As you might tell from the screenshot, the car used a full physics setup with an individual wheel collider and suspension for each wheel. It seems we will need to scrap this, though, for performance reasons. Hopefully, we can recreate the same feeling (or better), using custom code.