Mountain Bike Adrenaline Cover Art for the Playstation 2
Mountain Cycle Adrenaline is a Playstation2 sports game developped past Fresh3d (our company) and published by Nobilis in 2007.
How it all started
Yet another sports game
After the release of Wild Water Adrenaline, and its relative local success (given the smallness of the publisher), nosotros started working on the second sports game, this time about mountain biking. Indeed, the initial contract stated we were going to provide four activeness game titles, using the Salomon branding. Because mountain biking is a much more than popular sport than rafting, and because other competing product existed, the pressure was much higher and despite a similar budget (250 One thousand Euros) Mountain Wheel Adrenaline was going to exist a larger and more difficult project to make for our small company.
It'southward no cloak-and-dagger the game had terrible reviews. But when I read comments, I often run into people wondering why someone tin make crappy games like this. Allow me go this straight. The average PS2 game upkeep at the time stood at near two millions, having simply 1/8 thursday of that budget y'all realise we had to cut corners and that inevitably led to an unpolished, sloppy game. Add together to that time force per unit area and most no support from a small publisher with sparse pockets and you have a recipe for failure. Not anybody'southward failure. The game paid the wages, but information technology could have been so much better with a lilliputian more love, money and above all, time. These were called budget titles for a reason.
Freeriders
The game features a simulation of the physics of a bike, with dissever forepart and rear breaks, torque strength controlled through manual or automatic gears alter and the ability to spring while holding your bike. But if you've played this game, chances are that you lot do feel the physics sucks big fourth dimension :P
When we started working on the blueprint, nosotros choose not to follow the arcade orientation near of the competitors were going, specifically we wanted open up levels to explore, we wanted to reflect the freedom of free riding, every bit opposed levels designed equally linear tracks. We didn't have the budget and genre experience to compete with those other games and had to exist outsiders.
To provide that sense of freedom, nosotros chose the path of simulation, and that required the use of a physics engine. At the time, the just commerically available physics engine for PS2 and other platforms was Havok. It was already a very capable physics engine, even dorsum so, but just licencing it would accept swallowed most of our tiny development budget. Then we picked ODE, a complimentary open-source dynamics engine and recompiled it for PS2. It was tiresome and buggy, and Yann and his team did their best to make information technology work in our engine, and try not suck up all the performances, past optimizing some of its parts.
Broken physics
In the stop, we had a physics engine that unfortunately had some inhenrent flaws, such as some very irritating gluey collisions (most notably in trees) that many people complained (laughed) most. On peak of that, my fault was to put besides much effort into trying to emulate real obstruction behavior by putting too many physical collisions on smaller objects you could take gone through without noticing. It would take been less realistic, but a lot more fun, this is a videogame after all. Lesson learned.
Another problem was related to character animation most people discover wacky and sometimes cleaved. Actually the characters on the bike are fully physics driven, they are basically dolls with real-time inverse kinematics on both arms and legs. This is again an example of a bad practiced thought. It was a adequately advanced engineering for the time, only since nosotros had no tools nor time for an artist to tweak it to make information technology look good, we were left with bad looking animations. Even when the tech under the hood is fairly avant-garde, nobody cares, but the results count.
If you can go past those limitations nevertheless, I think information technology's fair to say the game can exist quite enjoyable at times. About announcer still seemed to think that it was a show-stopper and awarded the game with abysmal reviews. Some people however, moslty those who are actual mountain bikers, played the game plenty to go past the sticky collision bug and funny animation and seemed to rather bask the game'southward open tracks and the bicycle'south physics.
On a personnal note, I recall if you make the decision to practise a game based on physics and the physics is broken, then you innevitably become a crappy game, end of story. For all the good stuf there is to say about the making of this game, and all the prissy stuff I learned along its making, I feel it as a large failure, whatsoever the complex reasons leading to that result, as mentionned above.
Development process
Level concepts
Like information technology was the example for our previous game, nosotros chose 4 countries, each with a specific set of interesting spots and style. Then I started designing the levels by looking at video footage from all those countries, I grabbed some images as reference for designing the maps. I and then laid out huge images in Photoshop with tracks, obstacles, forests and whatnot that were basically 2d templates for the 3d levels.
Here's a reduced version of a levels template design, you can encounter the full versions in the galleries section below.
Level building
For our previous game, we were using instanciation of 3d tiles to create a level. This express the shape of the terrain as the tiles had to match to create a continuous surface, and were painful to edit.
For this game, nosotros went for a quad mesh that would be tesselated in realtime to provide smooth surface and level of detail. Dynamic tesselation was a very advanced characteristic for the time.
To a higher place: The terrain is modeled using quads.
Right: Tileable textures are practical to each quad. Quads are then tesselated dynamically at runtime to create smooth surfaces.
However, smooth surfaces were not enought to create convincing rocks and bumps, so past leveraging the power of the PS2's vector units, nosotros included vector displacement mapping in the class of tiny 32x32 sculpted grids to produce displacement values. This was an incredibly advanced characteristic, only made popular years subsequently with the appearance of DX11 capable hardware. Looking back at it however, I think information technology was a mistake to put and then much effort into a specific rendering technology. I retrieve ressources should have been placed on the physics and gameplay code showtime.
Considering the operation was express, we had to reduce tesselation with a steep curve according to distance, and that also created a lot of ugly poping in the geometry.
Left: Tesselated quads are displaced using a vector map to create more detailed shapes.
Terrain textures
In order to produce the well-nigh possible realistic terrain textures within our constraints I chose to start with photographs of diverse footing materials and assemble images equally tiles to map to our quad terrain arrangement.
After looking through the internet for basis motion picture material, it became quickly axiomatic I would have to do it myself as in that location was no quality source material bachelor. Indeed, to create ground textures, you need to be way to a higher place footing level in society to cancel perspective, otherwise your resulting texture is distorded. Ideally yous should place your camera at an infinite height with an infinite zoom to flatten the paradigm. Not very practical, only in general, let's say the higher the amend.
This creates ii major challenges that need to exist overcome. Lifting the camera at an ideal height, and triggering the epitome capture. This, I suspect, is the reason why such images are so rare, even today.
Starting time I had to devise how to trigger a photographic camera from a great distance. Some camera provide IR remote control, but the range is small-scale, and information technology doesn't work well outdoors nether brilliant light conditions.
I picked a garage door RF remote circuit with upwards to 100m range, and built my own remote control system for a small (back and then) compact camera.
Above right: the terminal remote controlled camera packaged and ready to fly.
Lifting a ~600g camera system (photographic camera + remote control arrangement) into the air requires some traction that non many technologies could provide at the time. I looked first at kite, merely the need for regular wind made it a no go.
It came to me that a blimp was the better solution, and so I ordered 1 with plenty volume (4 cubic meters) to elevator 1 Kg. This one is made of NASA-form fabric to retain the ultra fine molecules of industrial-grade 99.999% pure Helium, a rare and VERY expensive lighter-than-air inert gaz. Phone call me crazy and all, only this was as much fun to build than it was to use :P
Above: the remote controlled camera attached to the flying blimp
Right: me with the stuffed attached to a security 2KG weight at the terminate of the line. The blimp can go as loftier as 100m (300 anxiety).
After some rather successful shooting sessions, I had to stop using the stuffed considering information technology was quite impractical to transport, very expensive to refill, and the day had to be clear with no wind at all, or the stuffed would get-go to oscillate and make blurry pictures. I kept the remote command system and attached the camera to a 5m telescopic mast. A much more efficient and transportable organisation that I'm still using to this day.
Above: two examples of textures captured with the blimp remote controlled camera at nigh 20m high (60 ft)
Ugly graphics ?
The start time I heard people proverb the graphics for the game were ugly, I was rather shocked to be honest. I tought my environment textures were pretty good, and the models and environments quite detailed for a budget PS2 title.
But and then I realized they were not talking about the content, they were talking about the rendering quality. Ugly pixelated rendering. Indeed, we had the game running in interlace style which made the game flicker, and sometimes losing one-half the resolution when at that place was the smallest slowdown.
On height of that, nosotros didn't have any textures mip-maps at all ! Which meant xc% of the pixels on-screen were getting ugly aliasing (not to mention lost cache performance). And it showed. I really don't understand why nosotros didn't put some effort into a decent texture pipeline at the time.
Have a expect at these WIP of each of the levels. You tin see the rendering exhibits a lot of agonizing aliasing and geometry poping.
Sound furnishings
The musics for the game would be provided by the publishers, simply nosotros had to make all sound effects, a job I usually similar to handle when the budget doesn't allow for outsourcing.
For all the stock audio furnishings I accept in commercial libraries, specific sounds such as the one made past a cycle had to be created from scratch. And then I took my Marantz solid state recorder and a stereo condenser microphone and went for some sound capture sessions.
I captured tons of audio material while riding my mount bicycle, only a small portion of which features in the game. I also had an old rusted bicycle in my garage that I sent several times at full speed into a wall for that perfect crash sound. That was a lot of fun.
Right: me getting gear up for a sound outcome capture session
Bikes and characters
Salomon provided u.s. with a lot of reference material for the bikes and for the garments and accessories. Three internship artists worked on modeling the diverse bikes while Francois Debue took care of the character modeling, rigging and animation. Cedric Tempest also helped with additionnal modeling and texturing.
Left: some of the source materials from salomon included 360 degrees shots for garments, accessories and bikes.
Map pattern gallery
WIP gallery
Screenshots gallery
Reviews and articles
Probably the most interesting, in-depth, and honest review available: Let's play Mountain Bicycle Adrenaline.
Hither's function 1:
And hither's the last part, I get out it to y'all to check all the parts in-betwixt, if really you don't have meliorate things to do :P
Box fine art
Trivias
- After the release of the game, nosotros had troubles to become royalties reports from the publisher (sounds familiar?). The game was existence quite succesfull in the The states through a local distributor in that location (Valcon), and nosotros were not seeing any return from those sales (we gauge global sales standing at about 450k units). We required an audit and discovered what nosotros claim were hidden profits. We went to court and the case is notwithstanding running as of today, although because Nobilis went bankrupt since, chances for us to run into our money back are very thin.
- The year after the initial PS2 release, we were asked to brand a PC version of the game, moslty for eastern markets. Unfortunately every bit the budget was even more ridiculous, the programming team ended up packaging pretty much the PC prototype that was used during development. It featured an earlier version of the engine without dynamic shadow, LOD nor tesselation which makes the game stutter even on decent configurations and makes it moslty unplayable.
Credits
Engine programming : Yann Robert, Gregory Leblond, Cedric Guillemet
Game programming : Stephane Menardais, Yann Robert
Physics programming : Guillaume Raffy , Yann Robert
Additionnal programming : Flavien Lefebvre
Game Design : Christophe Bauvir, Stephane Menardais
Level design and environment art : Franck Sauer
Characters modeling, rigging and animation : Francois Debue
Additionnal modeling and texturing : Cedric Storm, Michael Geimer, David Lecrinier
Bikes modeling and texturing : Michael Geimer, David Lecrinier, Christophe Forton
Sound pattern : Franck Sauer
How to play the game today
You can probably get a copy off e-bay these days. Likewise information technology is quite cheap on Amazon.
Source: http://francksauer.com/index.php/games/15-games/published-games/25-mountain-bike-adrenaline
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