Real images from Raycity

I mentioned briefly in my post on Raycity that the streets and buildings are based on real locations in Seoul. I was out in 압구정 this morning and snapped a couple photos to show some of the similarities. I often pass this corner, so it was quite familiar to me when I drove by it in the game. It isn't perfect mind you, but its close. The subway exit goes in a different direction for example, but 2 years ago when the game was made, I'm not sure it could have faced that way. These are just cell-phone pictures, but I think they do the job.




The building under the bridge is the Hyundai department store. It is the rich people's department store, where a sale is something still priced at $200. The other buildings are some random apartments. The attention to detail here is pretty good. They've matched the road sign perfectly. Even the air conditioners on the sides of the apartments are there. I'm not sure if they fashioned these based on some low resolution photos or what.

Raycity Part 2 - Gameplay

Even though Raycity is an MMORPG it is of the "lead you by the nose" style, which makes the gameplay perfectly accessible to foreigners who don't really speak Korean. When the game starts up you'll find yourself in a small town area. There will be various NPCs standing around who want to give you quests. You can drive up to one and press enter. When you take a quest it will indicate how to do it in one of two ways. If the target of the quest is another NPC or something like and you're in the same area as them you'll see a big arrow point at them. If it is to do a specific cab mission you'll see markers on the main map telling you the area in which you can find the mission. You can just keep clicking okay and next until you've accepted a quest. Press L to bring up your quest menu and see your listed quests. Choose one and you'll select it as your active quest. If its a mission quest, bring up the map with TAB and you'll often see some quest boxes on the map. These tell you the areas you can go to to find the missions. Drive to those areas and you'll see various fares standing around. Quest ones will be a different color. Grab as many quests as you can and exit the town by driving in to the blue glowing area. The reason you want to grab multiple quests is that you will often have a fare that can satisfy the requirement of more than one quest at once. You might have a simple quest like "Drive 10 women to their destination" which becomes completed while you're doing a quest about picking up a specific individual. As you complete a quest, you'll see faint white words appearing mid-screen, these are updating various quests that you've just satisfied. I've seen a single individual add to the total of 4 different quests at once, so its worth it to drive around and pick up as many as you can. It can get confusing, especially if you decide you want to start clearing them, but it can also save some time. In the map above you'll see a white circle in one of the quest areas. After you leave the town you might want to head towards that one and pick it up. This is a tutorial quest giver who shows you various mission types and other things. She appears to be new as I don't recall her being there before and when I went in game to make some screenshots I hadn't done any of the quests for her. You can do around 12 different quests of various levels and then she'll pass you off to quest giver in the second "town" area. For all its simplicity I've gotten my car to level 57, and my character to level 17 (they're independent as you can change your car and level it separately) and in all that time I've probably been able to complete 99% of the quests without issue simply following this strategy. There is the odd quest that just has no real indication on screen where you are supposed to go. You can abandon it, or if you really want to do it, keep it and you might get lucky. Alternatively you could phone a friend. I don't know exactly how to unlock new areas, but I have. I believe it has to do with levels or perhaps doing specific quests. In the towns you'll also encounter various NPCs providing services. Things like gas, repair, garage, vendors, etc. You can buy new engines for your car and you can buy things to add some style to your car. You can't paint the car unless you want to pay real cash for it. So whatever color car you buy is generally the color you are stuck with. You do get a selection of reasonable solid colors to choose from when you buy a new vehicle.

You will notice that as you do missions some times the patrons will give you what appears to be junk. These are for bingo games. In the towns you'll find vendors who sell bingo cards. You have to place these items on them and try to make lines and trade them in for other items. If you want to complete them, grab a couple and find people who drop the items you need on it, keep doing missions for them and you'll get enough to get the item. You can have up to 10 bingo cards at once, but I find all the junk really starts to clutter the inventory so I prefer to do it as a concentrated effort, selling or trashing the junk when I'm not doing bingo. If you do the tutorial quests you'll understand what you need to get the most reward from a fare, but the jist of it is this: some people like crazy driving (most of them) and there is the odd person who doesn't. If the person cheers when you do something do it more, if the person freaks out, don't do it. The odd person who doesn't like driving prefers that you stay in the proper lane and don't hop over other cars. The people who like crazy things usually like near misses, hopping over cars and driving in the oncoming lane. Here is some gameplay of me on a mission. Not all fares will be upset by things. Most fares get upset if you slam in to buildings or other cars, but some won't care at all, so slam around all you like.



I also wanted to mention that Raycity is actually based on the streets of Seoul. Driving around some places I've seen familiar subway stations and even business fronts that I've passed frequently.

Raycity Part 1 - Install and Menus

Raycity is another game offered by Pmang. This is a stunt driving taxi MMORPG. What exactly that means is that you drive a car, jump over other cars and take little old ladies to their hair appointments. Apparently though those little old ladies like it when you jump over other cars and drive in the wrong lane. Before we get to that, let's get to installing it. Head over to pmang and click on "레이시티" you'll find it under NBA Street Online and EA Sports Fifa Online 2. Raycity makes our new favorite button even easier to find, it is labeled in English. Go ahead and push it to start the download manager. Choose a different download folder if you want, and then begin the download, wait for it to finish and kick off the install. So far its fairly similar to AVA, the only difference will be at the end. It is going to give you some extra check boxes. These check boxes will once again toss a pmang short cut on the desktop as well as a Raycity start up icon, and a quick link to the screenshot folder for Raycity. I pretty much always accept the default because I can always delete a short cut or something later. Now once you've finished the install, go ahead and start it up. The first thing you will see is this lovely image on the left. Apparently teenagers in Korea need to be told that causing your car to bunny hop 15 feet over a delivery truck is illegal and a bad idea. Also a cartoon cop is the one to tell them this. Super imposed over 3 sports cars tearing it up. Talk about mixed messages. Now once you've gotten past this screen you'll see the initial channel select screen. I'm not going to annotate all the menus in this game because some of them are pretty sparse. The channel select screen is pretty straightforward. Red means the channel is pretty full, yellow is not bad, white is the best. Generally channel one is red and the rest are yellow. Depending on the time of day you might catch a white channel or two. Using your list of words from AVA you should be able to notice that the first 20 channels are labeled "General Channel". The remaining 4 channels are labeled "Over 19" We're also faced with 3 buttons on the bottom instead of 2. "검사" means "test" in this case its going to verify the data files of the game. Why it permits us to start the game and then verify the data files I'm not sure. I've never found a need for it. I suppose if you're getting a weird bug you might try it. "끝내기" means "finished" or in this case quit. Clicking it will end your session. The remaining button let's us select a channel. Optionally you can double-click one of them. In the next screen we can create our character and car. This allows you to pick a name and a car for your character. Unfortunately I made my character a long time ago, and you can only make one. I'd rather not lose my progress to make a tutorial on that, but as I recall it was fairly simple and I muddled through it with barely being able to read the alphabet. I'll see if I can get screenshots of the creation though. To start your profile creation click "프로필 생성". I'll assume you've completed the process with no issue. If you do want to delete your profile you can click "프로필 삭제". Add "삭제" to your dictionary, you'll see this word from time to time and its an important one not to mistake. "나가기" means to back out to the previous screen. After you've made the profile you can click the familiar start button in the middle of the screen.
The first thing you'll notice is that your resolution is not good. On the right you'll see the main annotated menu. This is most of the main features of the menu as well as a few graphics options. This game performs very well. My system is a Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, with 2GB of Ram and a 512 MB 7900GTX. With max settings and 1920x1200 resolution I am pulling down anywhere from 110-150 Frames per second depending on where I'm driving in the city. I've never dipped below 100. Unless you're running this on a toaster you should have no problem running this on max settings. I recommend you start with the highest you can take and try it out. There isn't much point in tweaking anything here. For now, try driving around and doing some missions. F9 will give you an overlay of all the keyboard shortcuts (in Korean) but it can give you an idea what buttons you should be pushing. This is not a mouse game. Use the 4 arrows to drive, space to jump, ctrl to boost, shift to drift turn. Next up will be more in depth information on gameplay, screens and video.