This Is Not a Bug but a Game Feature-Chapter 192 - 142: Abstract Road Planning

The new game map isn’t big.

Although it’s a one-to-one replica of the real Jiangning City, a game is still a game, and it can’t achieve a perfect restoration.

In a typical AAA game, players might be able to explore the buildings alongside the roads, pillaging like bandits entering a village.

But in the game "Speeding Frenzy," the buildings alongside the tracks are merely textures...

It’s not just the buildings.

During a game session, the spectators cheering alongside the tracks are just background textures as well.

Based on this logic, even though the game map appears vast, the areas where players can move freely are limited to the sprawling road tracks.

Of course!

This situation is limited to urban areas; once you drive out of the city and into the deserted wilderness on flat land with few buildings, you can deviate from the tracks and roads and go wherever you please.

The whole industry does it this way.

Even in some racing games designed to AAA standards, urban maps lack strong interactivity.

Despite cities being large with many skyscrapers, they are all background textures that players can only view from a distance, not interact with closely.

Some special places are exceptions.

Like car modification shops, repair garages, insurance companies, and auto dealerships.

These "interactive" building locations are the only ones on the map where players can visit and interact with NPCs.

Other times, players can only drive their beloved cars, following the planned navigation routes, watching the street scenery from within the car.

"Make the map into an island!"

Chen Ba picked up a marker pen and drew a big circle on the whiteboard, then explained, "This is the ring road, besides the ring road, there are dozens of crisscrossing city main roads, and scattered hundreds of secondary roads on the island."

The road network is very important.

This type of racing game has two reference factors for track planning.

The first is gameplay; these roads are basically the main racetracks where players drive in races, and many competitions will take place on these tracks.

To make the races exciting and thrilling, road planning cannot completely follow realistic logic.

Roads that could be designed as straight lines might have some "bends" or even "hairpin turns" added for diversity and complexity.

Having played this type of racing game often, Chen Ba wanted to complain a long time ago.

The road planning in the game really sacrifices the rationality of road design for the game’s excitement and fun.

Press the M key, zoom in!

Based on the terrain and location, it’s not hard to find that some curves are entirely "intentional."

If the land is uneven with elevation differences, putting a few bends would be understandable. But on flat land without any obstacles ahead, they just randomly add a curve; what’s the point?

Oh!

Turns out it’s to avoid that tree or that stone pillar!

In any racing game, when you see this kind of senseless road planning, especially unreasonable curves... there’s no doubt that this is the game developer’s way of increasing difficulty for players!

Besides serving the game’s difficulty, road planning must adhere to the principle of diversity.

Halfway through building a road, funding suddenly runs out, transforming the asphalt road into a muddy path...

Driving through the forest, a sprint platform suddenly appears ahead, and all passing vehicles have to leap off the platform...

A perfectly fine seaside road inexplicably veers onto the beach, turning road cars into beach buggies...

These abstract road designs are actually intended to enhance the diversity and complexity of game tracks. Otherwise, if it were just highways all the way, how dull would that be?

"The road network is roughly like this."

Chen Ba drew a rough "spider web" diagram of the main road on the whiteboard, then said, "These are city main roads!"

The game can’t have only main roads.

Although the main roads are already rich and comprehensive, we still need some more complex and varied "winding paths," also known as secondary branch roads, as support.

Main roads in a spider web pattern, supplemented by dense winding paths, together form the track road network in "Speeding Frenzy".

This system is extensive.

Completing the entire road network will take as much time as inputting vehicle data, if not longer.

Collecting road condition information and simulating it using a game engine isn’t something that can be done just by talking.

By the way.

To develop the game "Speeding Frenzy," Chen Ba gritted his teeth to buy a few cars for the studio.

An SUV and a C-class sedan.

These two cars were purchased directly, and five different models were rented specifically for game testing and simulation sampling.

It’s basically enough.

It’s not that Chen Ba doesn’t want to rent more cars, but the studio only has a few employees with driver’s licenses, and renting more wouldn’t make sense as no one would drive them.

"Dong doesn’t have a license, haha..."

Lu giggled, taking one car out every day with Zhong Shengwei to have fun, then returning to brag to Dong about where they went today.

Yang Dong was speechless.

He had enrolled in driving school once but never managed to learn due to being busy with work.

He hadn’t thought it was a problem before, but now, being mocked by Lu daily, he felt the pressure and planned to get his driver’s license during the New Year.