Hi,
Im planning to do a research for a game. game would be a taxi driver - based in sri lanka. the player is to drive passengers from pickup to destination without damage to property or vehicle & passenger, maintain speed limits etc.
what I’m planning to research on
Routes -
as a start Im going to stick with 8 - 10 well-known & interconnected routes - getting data from google maps, & street view. (will be thinking of modelling later)
voices & sounds -
situations & passenger interaction with driver
vehicle interior sounds
argivements if any
so I will need to talk to a few drivers and get feedback, and also talk to some friends on their experience in taxies
I will need a lot of sounds of passing by vehicles?
I just have these two things on my mind & I’m planning to do the research for a couple of months as this is a side project of mine. what else would you think come in handy?
It’s a big task because you said you want to use real routes in Sri Lanka and follow the real driving rules.
This is my opinion but your best approach to it would be similar to the approach I’m going to my similar ideal. Approach it as both a driver and from the perspective of others driving or in the vicinity of the driver. And of course from the perspective of the laws in the country the game is set in.
Then as you drive think of how you would simulate the driving behavior in something as limited and 2 dimensional as a game on a TV or tablet and the game still not be too difficult or too easy.
It might be fun and it might not be fun but you or I won’t know until we actually develop our perspective takes on such a game.
Technically, whether you can program or not, there are some assets in the asset store that would help you probably:
However, because I choose those myself I might be biased that those are better so I advise you to investigate other assets in the asset store as well.
Also Easy Roads and Gaia in the asset store will help you.
Unity or any other game engine can’t handle much in terms of terrain so you’ll need to cull the detail in the right places and limit the terrain area to get a workable environment size for Unity. A city like Colombo is likely to be far to big and detailed unless you really make the details minimally recognizable as Colombo and that’s a lot of work but less than trying to doing a detailed model of Colombo of course. You’ll probably want to stylize the terrain somewhat then going for a realistic look so that your environment size isn’t too big.
OpenStreets.org and Microsoft Bing maps will be a big help to you in laying out Colombo’s streets.
You should also buy or have the Sri Lankan government issue you a driver’s ed book for Sri Lanka and encode the driver rules and behavior using a behavior tree you create that can encapsulate the rules. I plan to for USA driving rules. I intend on using:
Again, I might be biased for this solution because I’m using it. There are other solutions in the asset store too.
Finally, there are open source implementations for all of the above if you search for them. Note that using open source will involve more porting work and as you’ve seen from the incomplete list I’ve outlined above you have already a big task a head of you even using assets already created for Unity.