Hi, Truckers! You liked our [url=https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/849100/view/3085522248136381795]visit to the studio with Pawel Stolarski[/url], our business development specialist. We have another treat! This time, let’s dive into gamedev with [b]Grzesiek ‘Greg’ Gładkowski[/b], who works directly on the game. [b]Hi Greg! Tell us what you do in Road Studio.[/b] Hoo boy. It’s been a journey for me since I’ve been with the game from the very beginning. I did some modelling, but currently, I'm a Tech Specialist and Enviro Artist. I work on the look of textures in different weather conditions, and on the foliage and generally, the Alaskan flora. This is a rather challenging area and in the past four or so months I’ve been focusing on making our forests and meadows look nice and real. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//33660248/ee66b17039dbcc87bf89ff8bd349701bfc6909cb.jpg[/img] [b]It’s an appropriate job considering your personal interests, right?[/b] Yes, considering my two, let’s say, hobbies. The first one is 3D graphic design, which I got into around 2004. When Half-Life 2 launched, I spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours with it, or rather with its SDK. My friends and I used to make maps and scenarios for the game, and we got much more into it than in the game itself. My other thing is my passion for travel. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to visit the far reaches of the world, but whenever I have some free time, I go hiking or biking. Even when I play, I tend to play games where I can roam the world, like The Witcher 3, or, more recently, New World and RDR2. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//33660248/770b183d18bd8b3beb67a4528dea3c1849cb99ce.jpg[/img] [i]That’s not Alaska, that’s Zakopane, Poland![/i] So how do you make the plants and biomes for ATS? That was one of the first things that we had to work out. At first, we assumed we’d just manually create all the places, but the map is just too big for that, and the Alaskan flora too rich. So we decided to divide our digital Alaska into different ecosystems, which are very much like actual Alaska, with its vast snowy tundras but also warmer places with colorful meadows or picturesque river banks. These ecosystems, to put it simply, work like areas that procedurally spawn certain types of plants characteristic for specific parts of Alaska. We’ve put so much time into researching them that I believe that Maciek, who designed the layout of the map, could very easily get a degree in Alaska’s geography. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//33660248/8cf4465c40a45eecd3d6b24c0d857c43157c4028.jpg[/img] [b]Getting to the final look was a process, right? You didn’t do Alaska justice right away[/b] That’s right, and that’s because you have to make everything work together. It’s easy to work on one type of tree and pretty much nail it, but when you put this tree next to a hundred others, you’ll notice it doesn’t look right. You need to have your trees designed in a very specific way, and that’s an interesting subject in itself. [i]Łukasz Cieciura was the hero who redid many, many models and their geometry to optimize the look of our wildlands, and he’ll tell you more about it in a future post.[/i] This is also a question of performance optimization. It’s easy to faithfully recreate a biome, but it would’ve killed the performance of the game. In real life, the spaces between the trees are filled with ground foliage, ferns, bushes. However, it’s more CPU-effective to lower the canopy on the trees than add millions of individual plants or grass blades. The final result is similar to the real thing, and it sells the atmosphere of Alaska really well while letting you enjoy a high frame rate. So it boils down to balancing the realism and map design to achieve a coherent and believable artistic vision. And achieving this balance is one of my core tasks. [b]But you aren’t done just yet, correct?[/b] I can’t stress enough that we are still in the process of making our environments. In game development, you don’t go from A to B to C. You create part of A, part of B etc., and you gradually develop each, which results in improving the overall look. Eventually, you put everything together and it clicks, giving you the final vision. That’s why our visuals have been improving so much over the last months, and that’s why they keep looking better and better every week. [b]Tell us something about your work on the game’s weather.[/b] Basically, when we have an object in the game, my job is to make it look right in different conditions. When it’s wet or covered in snow. So I diversify the object materials, add snow height maps, or make the rain gradually increase the size and depth of puddles. This may sound easy, but we have lots and lots of materials. To handle them, our programmers created a management tool that tells the materials when to change their characteristics. As for the general solution for the weather, the seasons in Alaska are unlike in the central USA. There are basically two seasons, one warmer and one super cold. A single place can change dramatically over the year, from a frozen nothingness to a lively moorland full of colorful flowers. I’m working on translating this Alaskan atmosphere into our digital world. I’ve spent a lot of time on fog, light intensity, light colors and shadows. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//33660248/662c36f89bff6868776e87a6543dc5266f7bb57b.png[/img] [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//33660248/46556f186a273cd7b9946f65fba8134dc6228ead.png[/img] [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//33660248/a6747fd2713e60f43b7d0ed16ae1eed85124611b.png[/img] [i]One place can give a completely different vibe depending on the weather[/i] [b]What do you like the most about Alaskan Truck Simulator?[/b] That it puts emphasis on the thing that most simulators tend to treat with less care. While other games like to highlight the goal of your travel, like a city, where you can find an iconic building, what’s in between is just a general representation of the real world. We instead focused on the things you encounter on the way, the small towns that have their own personality, or with certain specks of wilderness that for some reason are very characteristic. We have our representations of the Magic Bus, the Mukluk Land, built around the characteristic Alaskan shoe, or Chicken, Alaska, where you can find an enormous straw chicken. You can go there or through there, make a stop, exit the truck, sightsee for a bit. It’s so immersive for me, and I hope the players will feel the same way. [b]Big thanks to Greg for his stories! And thank YOU for reading. See you next time, when we’ll reveal more behind-the-scenes tales about Alaskan Truck Simulator. Don’t forget to wishlist and recommend our game. To an indie developer, this means a lot as it boosts our visibility on Steam.[/b]