July 12th, 2002 (12:00am) - Dutch developer/publisher BumbleBeast (www.bumblebeast.com) announces the release of "Big Scale Racing", its first game title. Shop release is scheduled for August/September 2002. Big Scale Racing is based on the highly popular 1/5 scale Radio Control (RC) racing hobby, and will be distributed worldwide by Summitsoft (USA & Canada), HD-Interactive (Europe), Aqua System (Japan) and Ozisoft (Australia, under negotiation). Big Scale Racing was presented at the E3.
Big Scale Racing is a simulator-based, action packed, highly addictive and fun racing experience featuring 240 unique AI-players, 6 detailed tracks, realistic physics, LAN-multiplayer, and more. (see "Main features Big Scale Racing" below)
More information about Big Scale Racing, screenshots, and a public demo of Big Scale Racing can be downloaded from www.bigscaleracing.com
For more information please call (+31) 592 544793 and ask for Marcel Wierda or Mattijs van Delden or email us at info@bumblebeast.com.
Main features Big Scale Racing
*1/5 scale Radio Controlled (RC) petrol driven racing cars (length approximately 90 cm);
*High quality, high playability and lots of highly realistic racing fun at mid price;
*Broad difficulty range: easy to get into, but a challenge to master and win the championship;
*Runs on most Direct3D video cards, including legacy cards with legacy chipsets such as Voodoo1, Voodoo 2, TNT1&2 and Ati Rage;
*System requirements: Pentium 2 at 300 MHz with a Geforce 256 card is enough to run the game with all scalable options set to maximum;
*Multiplayer over a local area network (8 players maximum) and split screen (2 players);
*10 unique highly detailed cars (both in terms of body and dynamics);
*Very realistic handling of all the cars, from stable and slow beginner cars to fast and twitchy ’pro’ cars;
*240 AI opponents, each with unique behavior and skill;
*3 CDs of music to choose from on the track;
*6 highly detailed real-life race tracks;
*weather effects, including rain, fog, and time of day;
*modes: training (with ghost), quick race, and championship;
*two different race types: cup race (all cars are of a single specific type) and open race (car types are mixed);
*Big Scale Racing website and end user support by publisher BumbleBeast (through the website www.bigscaleracing.com);
*Technical highlights Big Scale Racing
*Triangle level terrain database: cars collide with actual terrain triangles.
*Single height terrain: height queries are very fast and return accurate z values.
*Terrain material: each terrain triangle can have its own ’material’ defined by parameters such as stiffness, damping, friction, sound, tire grip, tire resistance, and particle system type for skidding tires.
*Micro terrain: terrain material can specify a special texture that defines the micro-structure of the terrain, in addition to parameters that scale and offset this texture. This allows BSR for example to model grass: the wheels will sink into the triangle and the bumpiness of the grass and soil is accurately transferred to the tires of the vehicle.
*Force-based collision. Collisions in BSR are modelled using the physical properties of the materials involved to generate collision forces and torques. This is different from the approach most games use, namely that of impulse based collisions. Those collisions are instantaneous: at frame i the car is driving towards the wall, at frame i + 1 it has collided fully and is bouncing back from the wall. The collisions in BSR take a number of frames, in which the car actually slows down due to contact forces and speeds up again to bounce of a wall. Force-based collisions also provide stability in car-car collisions. Even when two cars start at exactly the same position, their collision will separate them in a realistic way.
*Detailed kinetics/kinematics car model (also known as ’physics’). The model contains over 250 tunable parameters, including tire parameters (caster, camber, toe, longitudinal and lateral slip factors, overload characteristics), engine parameters (torque curve, engine viscosity, engine mounts), drivetrain parameters (gear ratios, differential with tunable slip factor, clutch), suspension parameters (stiffness, damping, anti-roll bars), and more.
*Flexible Artificial Intelligence: each AI opponent in BSR is defined using 35 tunable parameters for each of the 240 individual contesters. Some of these are throttle response, steering response, throttle/braking agressiveness (how late and fast a car will brake into a corner, which speed to maintain in the corner, and when and how hard to accelerate out of the corner), and how agressive the car will be when overtaking or following another car. The result is that each and every one of the AI cars in BSR is unique. A unique parameter set is available for each AI driver on each track for each of the 10 classes/cars.
About BumbleBeast:
BumbleBeast promotes fair play and is committed to develop and publish high quality games at affordable prices.
BumbleBeast was established in January 2001 as a working corporation owned and controlled by Vesc b.v. The software and content development team of eight people has been working together for several years at Vesc on various business-to-business projects. Examples are RWS Control, a strategic simulation game (PC CD-ROM platform) in commission of The Ministry of Waterways and Public Works; automated Digital TV in commission of the US company Weather Plus and Dutch ANWB. Our website www.vesc.nl shows a series of other business-to-business projects.
Since 1996, Vesc developers have been working on the 3D-visualisation and simulation kernel 4Space and starting 2001, it is used for the creation of PC CD-ROM game titles. 4Space is a full blown engine and features 3D positional audio including doppler and 3D volume envelopes, visualisation, terrain algorithms, portal based culling and rendering, dynamics (cars, objects, general forces), artificial intelligence (classic rule based, Fuzzy Logic, scenario scripting), data collection/ analysis tools and various debugging and development tools. 4Space has been mainly used to build driving simulators. 4Space is available for Linux and the Microsoft Windows family, and uses either the OpenGL or D3D API for visualization.
In autumn 2000 BumbleBeast decided to start creating full product commercial gaming titles. Currently BumbleBeast has finished Big Scale Racing for PC (see the demo at www.bigscaleracing.com), and is developing "Atria Nova" (a Massive Multiplayer Online Real Time Strategy game. See www.atrianova.com for details). Financing of projects runs through Vesc b.v., the holding company of BumbleBeast.
