Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown

Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown by Nacon is the third installment in the Test Drive Unlimited series, set on a 1:1 recreation of Hong Kong Island. The game features high-speed racing, car customization, and a luxurious lifestyle, allowing players to join rival factions and explore a detailed urban environment. It emphasizes freedom, social interactions, and competitive racing in a vibrant cityscape.

My first job was as a junior gameplay programmer at Kylotonn, where I had the opportunity to work on the sequel to Test Drive License: Solar Crown. Originally, the project was meant to be a straightforward remake of Test Drive Unlimited 2, but it evolved into a full-fledged sequel set on the island of Hong Kong. This shift meant starting from the previous episode’s source code, which was developed by another studio, and integrating Kylotonn’s cutting-edge technology (KT Engine) for graphics and physics. The KT Engine is Kylotonn’s proprietary game engine, specializing in motorsports simulations and featuring PBR rendering.

When I joined the team, the project was in its infancy. Much of the old game’s source code was still present and partially playable. Our goal was straightforward yet challenging: clean up the existing code and implement the new features that would transform the 2011 game (TDU 2) into a brand-new, modern game!

Although I initially joined as a gameplay programmer, my knowledge of networks, which I’d recently acquired at Ubisoft during my internship on Ghost Recon, was called upon at certain times to give the engine team a hand on certain network features.

Responsibilities

Cleaning and improving

• Cleaning deprecated features, improving others
• Replacing some legacy UIs to debug IMGUI ones

Gameplay programming

• Racing related features
• Cars related features
• Making the legacy AI races opponents replicated
• World map first iteration
• UI integration

Network programming

• Helping improving and maintaining the network & replication system
• Developing some network features such as a Backblaze integration (S3 like cloud storage) to store some player data (for example screenshots or race ghosts)

And of course debug and optimization !