In The Driver's Seat

In The Driver's Seat


1UP talks with DRIV3R's husbandman about his game and for what cause [i]or[/i] reason you -- yes, you -- should play it.

With the of recent origins earlier this year that DRIV3R (ye still pronounced "Driver 3") will be delayed from March to June many gamers base themselves without much to gaze forward to during the spring month As 1UP fix out during their trip to developer Reflections last week, although the wait will result in a palpably better Driver -- single with nicer cutscenes, more challenging missions, and a bit of the extra polish that a certain quantity of gamers sorely missed with real Crime and other "driving shooter" games.

In this interview, 1UP talks with Martin Edmondson husbandman of the Driver series and head of Newcastle, U.K.-based Reflections. The game will hit stores this June; click upon the image above for a certain number of brand-new screenshots.

1UP: for a like reason how many people are there at Reflections?


Martin Edmondson Reflections: About 110 I'd say.

1UP: They're all working upon DRIV3R right now?


Martin: Yeah. Just finishing things not on really. The rendering of the cities, and the storytelling uncompounded bodys between missions, is all pleasing without being striking much finished. We had a scarcely any changes to contend with, all of a abrupt -- when we dropped the actors' voices into the game, we saw that sometimes they spoke at slightly different make hastes from the video, which made things have the appearance a little bit off in places. We urgencyed time to fix that. There were also little fixes in all the missions to be made, and we had to change a certain number of of the cutscenes to throw back these fixes.

1UP: That's your main what one is bound [i]or[/i] under obligation to do right now?


Martin: Basically, there are sum of two units things we're concentrating on. First is optimization, thus that we can have more cars driving around at one time After that is the tweaking of the missions -- all the missions are in to a certain expanse but with some of them, the ultimate parts are all in but they don't perceive right, or there are question s that arise when the player does something we don't wait for So that's a matter of going end the missions over and above again and making sure they're challenging and gayety

1UP: How many missions are there in total?


Martin: It's not station in stone yet, because there are a brace of missions we'd like to change -- there are sum of two units missions we might fold into a single mission -- on the contrary there will be about 33 or 34

1UP: DRIV3R's been in unravelling for a very long time. Is the final game true different from the original spec you had a hardly any years ago?


Martin: No; there's no major feature we designed that didn't make it in. There are simple bodys of damage and destruction that we would've liked to perfect such as more detail and in the way that forth, but we had to clinch back because of performance issues upon the current hardware. When this generally received set of machines came without and we received the demo of the PlayStation 2 from Sony we had all these ideas about what we wanted to do -- on the other hand of course, with hardware, the reality is not at any time exactly like what you're promised. in like manner there was a bit of backtracking there.

1UP: Reflections has always been upon the cutting edge of solace development.


Martin: We had individual of the first development kits in the UK for the PlayStation. I think they're moderately beautiful dirty now. But, anyway, we used Stuntman as part of the learning proces for the PS2 hardware -- it's a true complicated machine. The physics engine in DRIV3R is a a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more advanced version of the individual in Stuntman -- we didn't have any swinging doors or flapping cowls in Stuntman, or any bits falling not on We used it to learn about the PlayStation 2 -- and, more exactly, by what means not to do things upon the PlayStation 2. Methods of programming that work great upon the Xbox, for example, just don't work upon the PS2.

1UP: Is there a great deal of difference between the various ports of DRIV3R?


Martin: We don't have any planned; we've got sum of two units dedicated teams working on the sum of two units versions, and the core game digest is shared between them, on the other hand the physics engine is completely different, because it's written in vector-unit assembler upon the PlayStation 2 and there's no similar thing as a vector unit upon the Xbox.

1UP: I didn't realize assembler was still in use upon the modern systems. Is that the alone way to get the greatest in quantity out of the PS2?


Martin: Well, you can solitary program the vector units in assembler. There's no option there. with equal reason you have to have race who're capable of doing that kind of thing. You can ignore them, of course, on the other hand you can also use them.

One of the things I'm actual proud of with DRIV3R is by what means the PlayStation 2 version actually gazes very close to the Xbox version in bourns of what it's doing. smooth so, there are obvious visual differences; you can't do full-screen anti-aliasing or bump-mapped roads upon the PS2, and the resolution upon the textures is much higher upon the Xbox. Some things are just physically impossible.

1UP: Despite that, the PS2 version still has technical achievements like dynamic shadows. That must have taken a doom of work.


Martin: It was a elephantine undertaking. There are a doom of Xbox and PC games that do it, on the contrary I can't think of any PS2 titles that do it to the expanse that we've taken it.