Article Intro
Lone Peak
What was this track based on?
Scott: Lone Peak is unique in that it isn't based on any one particular area. It's sort of a homage to the national parks of the USA.
Did you have many stylistic influences when making the art for this track?
Scott: Yeah, quite a few, and some of them from unexpected sources. But there is a story behind them.
As I mentioned in the Motor City section, the track design for Burnout Revenge began when the designers handed us their shopping-list of new gameplay elements. Motor City and Eternal City were both fast-tracked to help prove that these new features would work, but before either of those two tracks were even designed, we had already produced a "proof of concept" demo.
One of the track artists managed to modify the Silver Lake track from Burnout 3 with the proposed Burnout Revenge gameplay elements. Imagine the Silver Lake track, but with alternate routes where you drive over the tunnels as well as through them, where you zig-zag through the trees, and where you could leap over the rooftops of the town area. In retrospect, it wasn't perfect - the gameplay elements didn't exactly flow from one another very well and you could steer yourself in the air to undriveable areas - but at the time it was absolutely brilliant.
We knew that we needed to deliver an experience like this for Revenge, but we're far too proud to simply throw in a modified version of a Burnout 3 track and call it a sequel. So our biggest stylistic influence boiled down to a one-line mission statement: "Make an area that lends itself to this sort of gameplay, but don't just do another Silver Lake."
From day one, we knew what we wanted to achieve with Lone Peak - high mountains, tall trees and sweeping vistas
This sounds pretty straightforward on paper, until you actually try it. During the concept phase of Revenge, all of us on the track team were pitching locations for all the new tracks. Initially, the Lone Peak track was pitched as Montana, because it had the look that we were after. So off we went, doing the research, and clocking up many hours on Google Image Search.
Compared to the way that this process usually works, the research for Montana happened in reverse. Traditionally, we would look at any reference image and pick out the potential gameplay elements, and say things like "I've got an idea - we could take that alleyway there and link it to the freeway here...etc".
For Lone Peak, we already knew exactly what we wanted. We wanted a town section, we wanted tall trees, big vistas, a sawmill and plenty of winding switchbacks.
Because of this, we found that we were just looking for images of Montana that fitted our gameplay elements - effectively shoe-horning a real place into our pre-conceptions.
This proved to be a counter-productive way of working, as the initial pre-production track didn't look or feel like Montana in any way. When we base a track on a real location, we always include things like feature buildings or real landmarks to convey the "flavour" of the area. The initial Montana track had none of this.
At this point, it was quite evident that Montana did not fit into our vision of Lone Peak, so we went back to the drawing board, and broadened our search. Rather than basing the track on any one location, we gathered reference images of every US national park we could find.
This proved to be a wise decision, as we had a lot more reference to gather, we could choose almost any image that fitted our gameplay plans, and we had our free choice of imagery to define the visual style of the track (there were whole vistas that we just copied entirely from the reference photos).
The result was a pastiche of national parks and mountain towns that were all indeed different, but fit together in a believable way. So much so, that there are still people who believe that Lone Peak was based on a single location. The Burnout Revenge article on Wikipedia lists Lone Peak as being based on "Blue Ridge Parkway", and parts of it probably were!
From here, the remaining challenge was how to distance this track from Silver Lake. This was difficult, because we couldn't get rid of the mountains, tunnels, or fir trees, and these were the key features of both tracks. So we looked at Burnout Revenge's art-style, and the stylistic direction for Lone Peak suddenly became very clear.
If the Silver Lake track is where you would go on your holiday, Lone Peak is the area that you would just drive straight through because you would be afraid to stop or get out of your car!
Silver Lake had a quaint little town, Lone Peak had a trailer park. Silver Lake had shimmering crystal-clear water, Lone Peak had dried-out mud-holes. Add to that the dilapidated shacks, the rusted sawmill, and the dis-used train tracks, and stylistically, we were onto a winner!
A decrepit trailer park - a setting we would never have included in Burnout 3
What makes the gameplay individual on this particular track?
Scott: Lone Peak was a track conceived purely for the purpose of gameplay. By the end of the game, the track team had grown confident with the Revenge gameplay elements, and could make any track play beautifully. Because of this, Lone Peak became the final track developed for Burnout Revenge.
In the alpha stage of development, when all the other tracks were being iterated to final quality, Lone Peak was still in its most basic form. We spent more than six weeks just tweaking the gameplay until it was perfect. The shortcuts had to provide just enough of an advantage for the long routes to remain a viable option, the sawmill had to look busy but still have a clear route that the player could drive through without crashing unfairly, and the trailer park had to be just large enough that the player would actually notice it, but not so large that it looked unrealistic.
The sawmill is full of detail, but there are two very clearly-defined routes through it
By the time Burnout Revenge reached its final stage of development, Lone Peak was distilled from a four-minute track to just under to two minutes of solid gameplay. I doubt there was a single person on the track team who didn't work on Lone Peak in some way. As a result, it is probably the smoothest ride of any Burnout Revenge track. The gameplay is individual in that it's the culmination of a year's worth of development experience and the expertise of almost a dozen artists.
Were there any challenges in creating this track, given the restrictions in hardware?
Scott: Lots. It's a common adage among the Burnout track team that whoever gets the forest track draws the short straw. It's not that forests are difficult to make or anything, it's just that all consoles hate them!
In games development, we have this thing called overdraw. Simply put, overdraw is where a pixel needs to be drawn more than once before being displayed. The more overdraw you have, the longer it takes to render a frame of animation, and the lower your frame-rate becomes. This is all very well, until you have to start modelling lots of trees.
To make a good-looking tree in a video game, you need a few hundred polygons, and they all need to be semi-transparent to simulate foliage. If you multiply that few hundred by the number of trees you have on-screen at any one time, your polygon count grows into the thousands. If you have these trees behind one another, you have to keep drawing all of those transparent polygons over and over, which increases the overdraw, and makes the process of creating dense forests at 60fps almost impossible! This overdraw issue is the reason why 99% of foliage in video games looks so terrible.
In the case of Lone Peak, we had an advantage in that our tree placement was so dense. Our forests were so thick that the player almost never sees the tops of our trees, because they are usually driving underneath them. So we devised a technique whereby all of the detail is only at the base of each tree, with two polygons at the top of the tree, filling out the rest of the shape.
From the driving line, the player only ever sees the bottom of every tree, allowing us to optimise them after a certain height
On the current gen version of the game, this went unnoticed and proved to be a successful optimization technique. In Burnout 360, we restored the trees to their full, high-polygon glory.
Are there any cool things that we should look for? Any tips or tricks?
Scott: There isn't much in the way of "tips and tricks" for Lone Peak. What you see is very much what you get.
As for cool things, I'm going to talk about animation.
Animated geometry detail in Burnout Revenge made its debut in Lone Peak
In all of the Burnouts, one of our recurring challenges has always been, "how do we make the tracks feel like actual living environments and not like deserted stage sets?" We can't put people in the tracks, so our efforts in this area are often focused into putting movement into the world. In the current-gen Revenge, we were limited as to what we could do with animation, but towards the end of Burnout 360, one of our graphics programmers implemented an animation tool.
When the animation tool was initially released for testing, Lone Peak was the track that it was tested on. Because of this, it has more world animation than any other track in the Burnout series.
The first day we received this technology, I stayed at work until 9 in the evening just seeing how far I could push it. By the following morning, we had birds in the sky, the cranes in the sawmill moved, the trees swayed, and the hanging signs in the trailer park shook in the wind. Outside of a crash or a replay, no one would probably ever see this attention to detail, but the extra animation does indeed make the track feel like an actual environment.
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