Update: Dashboard news - Stunt Car Online

One of the things that has been bugging me about the screenshots I've added to IndieDB's media section for Stunt Car is the cockpit. The steering wheel is a really low poly model that doesn't look great in screenshots. (in fact the entire cockpit has been pretty much cobbled together in a matter of hours)

So "redo the cockpit with more polygons" has always been pretty high on my to-do list. I want the in cockpit view to feel like a nice place to be, like the player is wanting to be in his cars little cockpit, with the big bad nasty world outside.

Now I'm no artist, and certainly not a 3d artist, so I've found modelling and texturing a real challenge in SCO, (as you can probably tell from the game!) - but I'm determined to make the cockpit better for the games (and screenshots!) sake...

Having recently played Test Drive Unlimited 2 on the Xbox360, I noticed something about their cockpits compared to mine........... There's are brilliant, and mine is rubbish!, there's simply no other solution than to increase the poly count of the objects in the cockpit and make them "real shapes" instead of trying to do it all as a texture...

So here's a high poly cockpit model of the dashboard (and seat) that I've done... The vents and dials aren't lined up right yet, (and there is quite a lot of optimisation that I can still) but this is a WIP blog, and so here's some Work in Progress screenshots.

Here's a closer look - it's my aim to get those dials to actually "display" something, whether it's boost activation, or laptime, or something..

Here's the new racing seat, a few more poly's can be ripped out of this and put into the normal map, but It's sooo much better than my old seat...

And a very early preview of the racing steering wheel..

Going for a much more "momo" style racing wheel, and when it's textured it'll be a combination of faux leather and carbon fibre... (with some sort of fancy brushed metal effect in the middle)

I might put some sort of logo or something on the actual steering column section.. we shall see...

Anyway, I thought I'd let you know what I'm up to.. (as well as implementing the AI, but that's another post!)

Cheers
Chris