This enables the gamer to choose a faster car, to deploy non-cop vehicles against the enemy and even take control of enemy cars. It’s not all bad news though, because he gains the ability to view the city from above and then to ‘shift’ into any available vehicle. Basically Tanner has been involved in a horrible car crash. The addition of the ‘Shift’ mode enables all those licensed vehicles – from trucks to sports cars – to be experienced.
Special thanks to Krishty for providing feedback on the development of this.Ubisoft Reflections has brought Hi-Def graphics and a ‘Shift’ mechanic - where players can ‘fly’ in and out of vehicles - to the beloved Driver series.ĭriver San Francisco sees gamers play detective John Tanner as he takes the wheel in more than 120 fully licensed and accurately rendered vehicles in a free-roaming, sandbox environment. Again, not that noticeable at ground level but obvious when flying a plane. This also has the effect of the sea level around Golden Gate Bridge looking somewhat high (not really noticeable unless you're flying a plane)Ĥ) Missing building roofs. This is due to the ocean and due to the elevation of SF being highly inconsistent.
The initial test looked too messy so I decided against it.ģ) The underground carpark in Union Square is underwater.
The fact that the road layout is completely different didn't help matters. Main reason for this is that the scale of the city layout was drastically off when compared to the real San Francisco. Entire city blocks and the multi-storey car park had to undergo extensive reconstruction due to missing polygons from the exporter.Ģ) I didn't add any additional buildings like I did with Chicago. The city of San Francisco will not be held responsible for:ġ) Although I went to significant lengths to fix gaps/holes in the buildings, I wouldn't be surprised if I've missed any in some of the more obscure parts of the city. By the time I was finished with this, the final blender file was 41.6Mb! With such a reduction in polycount, this will no doubt result in nice savings on rendering performance. Thanks to the polygon merge function that Blender has, it was possible to remove these in a matter of seconds. A problem that the Driver city exporter had is that it'd occasionally duplicate polygon faces anything upto 9 times.
To put it into perspective, the blender file I started with was around 90mb. The textures of this have been upgraded to 4K for improved fidelity via Gigapixel.ĥ) An extensive optimization process was performed with the city. The scale of the bridge is significantly bigger than the bridge Driver originally came with.
This was combined with Drivers original Roads/Pavements in order to maintain consistency.
This involved me having to add curved gradients to the base's of each of the slopes.Ĥ) Golden Gate Bridge has been replaced with a modified version of Flight Simulator X's Golden Gate Bridge. This was painstakingly done one at a time by hand.ģ) The slopes have been modified to play better with BeamNGs physics engine. An enhanced version of Driver 1's San Francisco arrives to BeamNG!ġ) Multiple spawn points allowing you to visit San Franciscos landmarks with ease.Ģ) All 903 2D Tree's replaced with BeamNGs 3D ones.