Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator News

We’re back with another edition of our developer blog! We hope you have been enjoying the things we have been talking about up until this point and we will have much more to share in the future. If you’re new here, don’t forget to join our Discord channel to stay up to date with the latest news from our team regarding Urban Venture as well as our other projects!

As a note, everything mentioned in this blog is subject to change as the game is still a work-in-progress. That means anything we share is not set in stone, and later down the line it could get iterated upon, removed, or changed completely!

With that in mind, let’s get into it.



As you know, creating a city at a 1:1 scale can be challenging as everything must be as it would be in the real-world. This means buildings, streets and landmarks as you would find them in real-life Barcelona must also exist in the game. As some of you may have already spotted, you can already find the La Sagrada Familia on the horizon when cruising the streets. We have also added in some new stuff like the Parc De la Ciutadella and Hivernacle del Parc de la Ciutadella, check it out:





In addition, we’ve managed to set up a couple of POIs (Points of Interest) on the map, which directs our engine to adjust traffic, and then allows us to witness denser traffic in these areas at any given time. For example, there will be many more cars around the office districts during rush hour.



Environmental destruction is a thing now in Urban Venture. For example, your vehicle can now knock down the bollards on the streets. While before they were made of solid steel… Now, you can simply run them over. Sadly, we don't have a video to show of this, due to some bugs on-going with the car, but we will share some imagery of this soon!



This is something that a lot of people from the community have been asking about and we’re happy to say that we have implemented the first iteration of a Day/Night cycle in Urban Venture. There is not much more to say besides the fact that we will continue to make it better throughout the development process, like the time of day affecting traffic. In the meantime, see the outcome for yourself:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]



Since we started the development of Urban Venture we have been focused on creating the world of Barcelona on a 1:1 scale. This was a huge undertaking and now that we have generated most of the world, it’s time for us to start focusing on actual gameplay. One of the first gameplay mechanics we have added to Urban Venture is the gas station!





The player will be able to pull up to a pump, and fill gas up manually depending on the amount of money the player wants to spend, or you can automatically fill up the entire tank at once! At this moment, there are three gas stations you can find in Barcelona. In the future, we will be talking about charging your vehicles as we also want to add electric cars to the game as well!



We’re also super excited to share with you all some of the in-car features that we have been teasing since the announcement of Urban Venture. We’ve talked about how the player will have full control of the vehicle's cabin as you would in real life, and here, you can finally see the progress we made. You can even roll the window down now with the press of a button! The navigation system has also been added and improved in the cabin.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Of course there is still some more functionality to be added to the button cabins and we will for sure share more details on that in the future!



We can’t thank the community enough for showing support for our games. We have been to SXSW (South By Southwest) and PAX East in the last few months and it was really great to see people's reactions when we showed what Urban Venture was about. The reaction online was also fantastic to experience.

We will keep you guys updated as time goes on and we will have another Dev Blog planned for you all soon! Make sure to follow us on all social media channels which you can find here, and make sure to join our Discord channel to chat with the developers!


Hasta La Próxima,

Aleksandra
Urban Venture Producer

[h2]Hello Drivers and Engineers! [/h2]

Welcome to our second blog post! We thought we might take a little bit of a different approach in this post and properly introduce ourselves to the community. We have some established fans from the Train Life community and now, with the development of Urban Venture, more and more people are coming to get to know us.

We know you all are hungry for more information regarding Urban Venture as well as Train Life: A Railway Simulator (Trust us, we are eager to give it to you!) but we thought it would be cool to also take a step back, and give the community some insight on who we are and what we plan to achieve. We will be sharing more information regarding updates and news for both Urban Venture and Train Life in the near future. So, who doesn’t love a little bit of a back-story? Let’s dive right in!

[h2]Get To Know Us[/h2]



We started off as a software house in 2014 specializing in training simulations. Since then, we have been creating professional simulators, e.g. for trainees in the United States who were learning to drive real-life trains, and we used this as the basis for our business today.

After several years of hard work we gained the knowledge to create vast worlds and immersive simulators for the gaming community. We have specialists from all over the world and right now we’re about 70 people strong all having experience in the gaming industry and beyond. In our everyday work, we use modern equipment and in-house technology such as Traffic AI™ and City Generator, tools we use to make the games you see today and will make in the future. We’ll talk more about those in a bit!

[h2]We Make Premium Simulation Games[/h2]



We’re an independent game-developer focusing on premium vehicle simulators. As you guys may know, we currently have 2 titles; Train Life: A Railway Simulator and Urban Venture. We value quality over quantity and we believe that gameplay is king. Our technologies let us implement scale & details easily, mapping real life cities and streets while also giving your fellow drivers on the road believable actions & reactions. With those taken care of we can focus on making sure the core foundation of our gameplay: the driving, the progression, and the exploration, all feel and work great.

It’s also very important for us that our games are available on all platforms - not just PC but also consoles. As we deal with COVID-19 and other difficulties, computers and technology have played a major role in our daily lives. We want to cater to people from all walks of life that play our games. From the hardcore sim fans with years of experience and an intricate simulator setup, to the casual player that just wants to relax after work.

[h2]Let’s Talk Tech[/h2]

We've developed two pieces of technology that we mentioned earlier in this blog, Traffic AI™ and City Generator. We use these technologies inside of our video games to bring players a fully immersive experience.

Traffic AI is an external library which places cars on virtual roads that behave just like they do in the real world. We have used this technology in real life autonomous vehicles to teach their intelligent algorithms. If you’re interested for more information, feel free to check out this link.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

City Generator is an advanced tool that allows us to instantly create virtual environments in 3D, ready to be implemented into any game engine. We use OSM (Open Street Maps) data to automatically create and generate cities where we can go back and make edits and changes as necessary. You can learn more about how we do this, by checking out the video we made describing this process in some more detail.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

With that, we think that’s about it from our side! We wanted to give you a bit of background and share a bit of our roots before we start to dive into sharing the development of Urban Venture. We’re happy to be part of the community and you guys have shown us a great amount of passion for the games we make. In turn, this gives us the motivation and focus to bring you guys games that you will play for hundreds, if not thousands of hours in the future. Without the community, we wouldn’t be in the position we’re in today. Thank you.

Stay tuned for more, there is much to be done!

Mike
Simteract Community Manager

Welcome to our first developer blog for Urban Venture! We’re very excited to talk about some of the things we have been working on and what is to come in the future for Urban Venture.

Please keep in mind however, that everything that we talk about in this dev blog is subject to change! Game development is an on-going process of iteration and experimentation. Everything is a work in progress, and may be changed completely by the launch of Early Access.

With that in mind, hopefully we will answer some of the questions or concerns you might have about the development process, so without further ado, let's get into it.

[h2]Features[/h2]

We’re going to have many features in Urban Venture like realistic driving physics, a 1:1 recreation of a 20 km2 scaled city of Barcelona, and much more. We’ll be exploring a variety of features in these posts, but want to highlight a few that we’ve been working on recently:

[h2]Story Arcs[/h2]

Story arcs and NPC dialog minigames are going to play a big role in Urban Venture, which will influence the amount of experience and money gained from a job. You’ll be engaging your rider in conversation and making dialog choices as you get from Point A to Point B. This means depending on your responses and the customer’s requests, your rider’s sentiment and attitude can shift positively or negatively during the ride.

Here is one example of a WIP dialog exchange with a client:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

But, this is not a “one and done” thing! Let's say you finish a conversation with a client, and you meet the same client again moving forward. You can continue the conversation and see what the outcome of their story arc is. Right now, this feature needs some more polish, but the content above gives you a good idea in the direction we’re going in.

[h2]Quick-Look[/h2]

Awareness of your surroundings is something that plays a big part in Urban Venture. We want to make the player aware of what is going on the streets of Barcelona just as you would need to be aware in real life. This brought us a challenging question; How will we help the player become more aware of his/her surroundings without blocking the line of sight by the vehicle's design?

For example, when you pull up to an intersection and you have to lean forward to see when the light will switch. We understand that this isn’t really an issue in the US, but in the EU, with our tiny cars and tiny streets, this definitely is!

We remedied this by implementing a quick-look/camera-lean feature that you can see in this example:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

This took some work, but we believe it will help with immersion of playing the game and help the player be more aware of their surroundings. In third-person this won't be needed as you can just move the camera around according to your needs, but since we are making a simulation game, players that are looking for a “as close to realistic experience as possible,” will find this a welcome mechanic when driving the car in first-person.

[h2]Vehicle Damage and Maintenance
[/h2]

While you won’t be checking cars off the roads for takedowns, we do want vehicle damage to be something to consider and avoid while driving in Urban Venture.

Vehicle damage will have an influence on how your passengers react to you or how your vehicle performs on the roads. For a proper immersive experience, we’re experimenting with a destruction model generated by Houdini’s procedural system to allow the vehicle to react to the environment as naturally as possible (feel free to see our video on how we use Houdini to procedurally generate the worlds we create). Right now, we’re just testing specific points of damage on the player's vehicle.

The player will be able to customize and maintain their vehicle using the garage that will be available in the game sometime around Early Access launch or beyond. As we get closer to the launch, we will share some more information on that.



[h2]Radial Menu[/h2]

Since we’re on the topic of car service and NPC interaction, we needed a way for the player to easily maneuver around the HUD and interact with the vehicle as fluidly as possible.



We’ve mocked up a quick version of a radial menu that we’re planning on adding into the game. This is just our first version and we’re still not sure if we will actually use this method for the game. Overall though, we think it gives the player choices on how to interact with the vehicle ranging from opening or closing passenger windows or turning the wipers on/off upon the client’s request when playing with a regular gamepad.

That’s it for our first blog post! As you can see, we’re actively working on a lot of features for the game, and we hope you like what you see so far. Stay up to date with the latest news from Urban Venture by following Simteract on social media, as well as joining the official Discord where you can talk with the developers directly!

We really appreciate all the love for the game we’ve been getting from the community so far, you guys are the best and we hope you’ll stick around and see what we have baking in the oven for the future 😉.

Hasta la próxima,

Aleksandra
Urban Venture Producer