One of our followers sent me a tip about DRAG, an off-road racing game being made by an independent developer. It features realistic physics and uses an in-house game engine which is interesting because most independent game developers use either Unreal Engine or Unity, the game looked like people would love it as much as they would love the www.easyslots.com games. DRAG looks promising based on its current progress so, we contacted the game developer. Fortunately, our request for a short interview was accepted.
Interview – The Folkers (Orontes Games Studio)
Back2Gaming: Can you share us a brief background about the Folkers brothers as a game developer? Does any of you use Linux for their gaming PC’s at home? If yes, what distro?
Orontes Games: We – Christian and Thorsten Folkers – are 30 and 29 years old and have been working in military software development in Germany for some years. However, our real interest is game development. So we quit our regular jobs and founded Orontes Games together. My brother is working on Fedora, while I am using Windows. Like that, we can make sure the game works well on both systems and that multiplayer between Linux and Windows machine is also working nicely.
Back2Gaming: Aside from Valve’s push for Linux, what other reasons made you decide to develop DRAG with support for Linux?
Orontes Games: It wasn’t really a decision we made- my brother is working with Linux since the very beginning. We are strong supporters of the open-source idea/community. So Linux was first, but we also ported the engine and game to Windows.
Back2Gaming: Most indie game developers that support Linux use either Unreal Engine or Unity. What made you decide to use an in-house game engine? Did it make developing on Linux easier?
Orontes Games: The engine started out as a hobby “side project” of my brother. It began to look promising around 2011 when we decided to take it a lot further and build a game with this engine. In retrospective, it was a great decision because we now have a lot of custom techs like the wheel blur and our physics.
Back2Gaming: What do you think is the biggest barrier to adoption of Linux for gaming? What can be done about it?
Orontes Games: Having a game engine built under Linux is probably a good start! We have ideas and plans for future titles and would love to continue developing Linux / Windows games on our engine.
Back2Gaming: How will you differentiate DRAG from other racing games with realistic driving physics? What game modes will be available for the single player mode? Will there be some kind of career mode?
Orontes Games: We are currently building the single player mode but I can´t give you a lot of information yet :). It will be something challenging and rewarding. But of course, a major element of DRAG will be competitive multiplayer racing. Personally, we also love the feature of split screen online driving where two guys can take part in an online race together on the same machine.
Back2Gaming: Will Mesa be compatible with DRAG on release day? I have extensively tested Radeon RX 480 8GB on Mesa 17.3.x and it works great on many of the latest games.
Orontes Games: We are still looking into that. We have a Radeon RX 480, too, and are comparing and testing DRAG on Mesa. But we can´t make an official statement yet.
Drag System Requirements
Back2Gaming: Can you give us tentative system requirements for running the game at 1080p @ 60 FPS with maximum image quality? How about driving wheel support and gamepad support?
Orontes Games: DRAG runs well for us on an Intel Core i5 and an NVIDIA GTX 660 with the graphics settings from the screenshots at 1080p with around 60fps. Under Linux, we also tested the Mesa driver and it worked too, but we would not call it officially supported yet.
DRAG is intended to be played with a gamepad. We developed a nice force feedback and recommend a PS4 or Xbox One pad. Xbox 360 pad works great as well. We have all common gamepads and are extensively driving and comparing them. You can also use the keyboard if you don´t have a pad but that´s not something we would recommend.
We have a Logitech wheel for testing as well. While it´s technically working it´s definitely something for a future update. We have a lot more work to do on wheel support.
Back2Gaming: Will DRAG support ultrawide resolutions such as 2560 x 1080 and 3440 x 1440?
Orontes Games: Yes, we support all screen resolutions up to 3840 x 2160.
According to the developer, if all goes well, the Steam Store page will be up near the end of February 2018 and will be available as an Early Access game between March and April 2018.
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