15 July 2010

Fishlabs's Rally Master Pro Now
Available For Free On Satio And Vivaz

It is one thing to stuff a lot of nice hardware into a mobile phone (PowerVR SGX equipped Symbian smartphones) but it is quite another story to make all this power available to the developer and attract them to make the games which take the most advantage of the hardware!

Sony Ericsson did an amazing job here and gave all necessary support and tools to Fishlabs’s engineers to port their Rally Master Pro from iPhone to Symbian featuring almost the same functionality on Satio (only automatic acceleration when using touch controls due to single touch on Satio and no multiple simultaneous sounds due to lack of layered sound capabilities).

According to Fishlabs CEO, Michael Schade, the new and updated version available for Sony’s high-end Symbian phones is ‘the best version’ of the racer, with ‘better than PSP quality’ graphics and what is even more important the game is available for free!

Rally Master Pro has been pre-loaded onto the two devices with the first firmware update, but if you’ve missed out for any reason you can also download the title for free from Sony’s PlayNow service.

Although the resolution of the Satio display is quite higher compared to the iPhone they have managed to get a stable frame rate of 30 frames per second on both devices running identical game code and graphical assets. Thanks to the better screen resolution of Satio, it is stunning how much more details can be rendered in the scene (the original iPhone textures were designed with some head room for larger screens).

Real tracks, more tracks, lots of tracks

Rally racing is about speeding and drifting on tracks with varying surfaces like asphalt, gravel or sand as if there was no tomorrow. You need to have wide and narrow roads with straights mixed with various types of curves.

The roads also have to go up and down hill and feature challenging crests or constrictions. Every track has to have a personality and you as a driver will be introduced to this “person” by your co-pilot. So you better listen carefully to him to be able to master it and become a pro – yes, we are serious about the name of the game.

If it’s a rainy day go rally racing on iPhone

In a real rally you don’t always have nice weather. In fact, the weather condition has a great influence on the driving behavior of your car. Asphalt gets slippery when it is wet and if you are going off-road it gets worse. In winter, when racing on snow, you are drifting more than anything else and skillful driving becomes an art. To bring this experience to perfection in a rally racing game you need physics that reflect the driving behavior properly.

Even on Java we had 3D physics running in Rally Master Pro™ that were calculating each wheel separately depending on whichever surface. However, on iPhone, with way more computing power, we could increase the sample rate much higher and achieve a much more accurate driving experience in the game.

Give me some eye candy

To make you “feel” the road underneath your tires you not only need good physics and spot-on controls. Last but not least, the visual feedback on the weather condition needs to be accurate as well or the illusion of being in a real rally is ruined. We already had an advanced particle simulation in Rally Master Pro™ on Java.

Each wheel was emitting various dust and dirt particles depending on track and weather condition. However, on the big screen of the Symbian 5th Ed devices it was not convincing enough. So we had to start all over and create the particle system from scratch with a graphical user interface so we could tweak all the parameters in real-time. Now you can see mud flying into the camera when you drift on off-road tracks through the trees and huge clouds of dust vapor behind the car if you are on a dry, dusty road. Check out the spray when it is raining and you are racing on asphalt.