Simteract, to whom we already owe the very good Train Life, is beginning to communicate about its future title: Urban Venture. This taxi sim promises to set the bar high, blending polished vehicle physics with a realistic road traffic system.
The month of April made the developers very talkative. Two “devblogs” 2 weeks apart appeared on the game's Steam page, giving at least a graphical preview of Simteract's future taxi simulation which will probably be launched first in early access, in order to get feedback from the community.
Game features
Ubran Venture takes place in the city of Barcelona. It is a portion of 20 km² (approximately 4,5 x 4,5 km) at scale 1 which has been reproduced. Like Train Life, a scenario allows players to progress: story, dialogue with NPCs, and mini-games, will play an important role and will influence the quality of service and the amount of money earned. You will therefore be able to chat with your passengers during the journey from point A to point B, which will influence the attitude of your customer, as in the video below:
And the conversation system is continuous. That is to say that you will be able to resume the dialogue with the same client during a new meeting. A rather interesting use of NPCs which brings a little more immersion.
Vehicle damage and maintenance
“We want vehicle damage to be something to consider in order to avoid overly sporty driving in Urban Venture” announce the developers. Damage to your vehicle will affect how your passengers react to you or how your vehicle performs on the roads. After all, who wants to get in a stoned cab?
Simteract is therefore working on a destruction model generated by Houdini's procedural system to allow the vehicle to react to the environment as naturally as possible, like a beamNG.drive. At the moment, the development work is focused only on the taxi and not on the environment vehicles.
The player will be able to customize and maintain his vehicle using the garage that will be available in the game. This feature may not yet be available when launched in early access.
A (very) lively environment
Simteract is developing 2 in-house technologies that will be used in Urban Venture: Traffic AI and City Generator. Names that speak for themselves. Traffic AI is an external library that places cars on virtual roads and behaves as they do in the real world. The algo has been on real autonomous vehicles, in order to teach it real traffic conditions. A really crazy and successful project !
City Generator is a tool that allows you to instantly create virtual 3D environments, ready to be implemented in any game engine. Developers use OSM (Open Street Maps) data to automatically create and generate cities in which they can intervene by making changes. Just watch the video below to see the power of the tool and its ease of implementation in a production workflow.
We will closely follow the development of Urban Venture. Its design is very interesting, and the desire of the developers to satisfy the players promises to offer an immersive game. In the meantime, here are some images to savor.