Sony SCE’s upcoming PlayStation 4 exclusive Driveclub maybe one of the potentially good looking racing titles to arrive this year, but there’s hardly any information related to the game that has been revealed by the developers. However, it seems like all that is starting to change with the company finally deciding to make some of details about the game public for the fans.
Technical art director Alex Perkins was recently interviewed by The Guardian, where he confirmed that the game has environmental settings that can rival any modern PC first person shooter, alongside a day and night system that lights the game with its realistic approach.
“While we've known for months that DriveClub would take place in locations around the world, Evolution has only really showed Scotland so far – but while visiting the studio recently, we also caught glimpses of the impressive Canada and India environments,” Perkins stated. “The art staff did what art staff do on racing games: they went on months of field trips to research architecture, geography and habitats; the difference is, the Evolution team seems to be trying to cram all of it into the game.”
For each country in the game's roster, there are miles of landscape, filled with authentic local detail, with most of the circuits being inspired by real-life roads and the local street racing routes the researchers learned about. "All the detail we're putting in is equivalent to PC first-person shooters," Perkins stated. "And then we're throwing a whole dynamic lighting system over the top."
Addressing that, Perkins stated that everything in the game is lit by a true 24-hour day/night system, rather than the normal “baked in sequence of pre-set lighting changes.”
"We've developed our own capture technique so the lighting in shadow, the lighting in direct sunlight and the way the car highlights fall off over distance – they all maintain proper energy conservation values. We had to redesign our entire materials system – how we actually collect the information; it's much closer to the process you'd have on a film set for compositing CG elements into a live action image."
As far as effects like lens flare coming into titles solely to mimic the sense of viewing filmed footage through a screen to make it look like a movie, Perkins said that while all that sounds very attractive and is a must have for all the upcoming games, the procedure is becoming much more complex with the lighting technology maturing.
"None of the direct light or shade is faked anymore," Perkins added. "It's at the point where you can see things like dynamic lens flare when you look at the sun and you can see a bit of chromatic aberration because we're mimicking slightly cheaper film lenses to capture deliberate imperfections that will make the game more lifelike."
Driveclub is currently set for a Q4 2013 release exclusively for the PlayStation 4.
