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Inscription: 08 May 2002
Localisation: Sydney
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http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Me...dia.htm?CS_pid={AAF681D0-47A4-4BCB-9CFA-849172CE25FC}
Citation:
ecently, Game Informer staffers Matthew Kato, Andy Reiner, Andy McNamara, Joe Juba, and Billy Berghammer got to team up for an interview with Codemasters Matthew White, Codemasters Juice Studio Chief Game Designer, and got the tender vittles on everything that has to do with their upcoming racing title, TOCA Race Driver 2. Get the goods right here....
Game Informer: Does TOCA Race Driver 2 feature a new physics engine?
Matthew White: The game features a whole new physics engine for the handling, and the car is under pure physics. Not a central pivotal point, or any pivotal points on the car, so when you drive the car around you feel the weight shift as it goes around corners, and when the car accelerates and decelerates.
GI: Did you guys take all these cars out and test them on tracks to get a feel for the physics?
MW: Yeah, sure. What we did was start out with a test bed car of a physics base, and each car in the game has got a massive database that goes along with the car for us to program all the cars. The database consists of technical information about the car. Things like technical specifications of the engine, the engine displacement and where it sits on the car, torque. But then it also goes into more technical things like how stiff the body is, how much ride is on the suspension arm, every detail. We get that information from the manufacturers. We then put the car together. The car models are based on CAD data from the manufacturer, which we then turn into polygons, and then put them in the game engine. Each component of the car is separately modeled. All the wings, the body, and the doors, so they can all be deformed when they have an accident. And we’re running a race with 20 cars all with damage, so you can damage all the AI cars.
GI: What kind of routines will the AI cars go through if you’re constantly bashing a certain driver? Is he going to know that and get you back?
MW: Yeah. The AI have a 360˚ sphere around them. What we do is we lay down an AI line for each track. Now that is the best possible racing line that they can possibly do. But they don’t stick to that AI line. So if you try to undertake one, and you go into his line, he’ll move out of the way, depending on how aggressive he is. So each apposing driver have their own characteristics. So if it’s a particularly aggressive driver, and if you try to overtake them, they’ll try to force you off the road or close the door on you. If they’re less aggressive they’ll let you go through, but then they’ll have a go back at the next corner. What you see is the AI driver – they make mistakes, so you’ll see them spin out, and see them crash, and unlike other racing games they don’t just stick rigidly to this line. So they respond on how you’re doing in the game and where you are at all times. The AI all knows exactly where you are.
GI: Say for example you’re behind an opponent and driving all erratic and swerving all over. Will they be more prepared for you if you were to hit them?
MW: Yes. Depends on the particular driver on the statistics that we’ve given it. So like the top drivers they’re much more skillful and much more aggressive, where as the less skillful drivers are more likely to make a mistake. Now you can slipstream past the other cars – which is part of the physics engine. We also have air friction, so when you’re behind another car the friction decreases, so you can then draft past another car.
GI: Do you have a drafting meter?
MW: No you don’t. You can kind of pick it up intuitively through the controls. We kind of wanted to keep away from too many on screen prompts. What we wanted to do with this game is if you make a mistake, like if you break too late or you go into a corner too fast, is give the player an opportunity to rectify his mistake. So it’s like a window of opportunity within the engine.
GI: So obviously it’s a very detailed game – more cars, more parts, you’ve got 19 other cars on screen, are there any other different techniques you guys did with the Xbox this time around to make that possible?
MW: We knew from the outset that we wanted to do a game that was 60 frames per second. We did some experiments to see how the game handled at 30 frames, and how it handled, and we quickly came to the conclusion that a racing game – 60 frames makes a lot of difference with the feel of the game and the sense of speed, and how good the handling is of the cars. We also knew that we wanted to do 20 cars on the track, and we wanted to have the mesh of the track, all loaded at any one time so there’s no asynchronous loading. That was a very tough challenge for the programmers to do all those things and have the damage, and it just really requires a really optimized and efficient graphics engine.
GI: In going into 720p what problems or limitations do you run into? Why don’t more developers do 1080i?
MW: I think it’s the same problems they have with the frame rate. It comes down to the engine and how efficient the game engine is, and what you’re asking it all to do. We looked at the impact of all the elements of the game, how much impact does the damage, rain, smoke – and the more things that you’re drawing on screen at one time the harder it is to get the game running at high frames.
GI: I never really understood what TOCA was, can you explain that to us non-Europeans?
MW: Yeah, that’s a good question. In the UK we’ve done three TOCA games on the PlayStation and we did TOCA on PlayStation 2 and Xbox, and it’s really a gaming brand that Codemasters is trying to develop. Everyone in Europe knows it as TOCA, so we decided to bring that brand name worldwide this time around. It doesn’t really mean anything too much. It is an actual type of racing that they do in Europe, and we used it in the first game that we did. Then we bought the name, because there was another publisher that was looking to do a game with the same TOCA name. So we just want to establish it as a racing brand.
GI: Is TOCA like this in Europe where there’s a variety of racing?
MW: No, not really. It’s like Saloon style racing that they do in Europe. The game doesn’t really reflect what it is in real life. It’s only a small thing in the UK, not that many people have heard of it. But we’ve been doing TOCA games for quite a long time, so it’s become its own thing.
GI: How many players can race simultaneously via Xbox live.
MW: We’re looking at doing 12-16 racers, at the full 60 frames per second. We’ve done some tests with 12 players and some tests with 16 – with no lag at all.
GI: Will there be tournaments or leagues or any structure for that setup?
MW: That is probably a question for Microsoft.
GI: Have you implemented anything to avoid cheating on Xbox Live?
MW: You won’t be able to cut corners. We’re actually in the process of laying down cheat lines in the tracks, to stop players from cutting corners. Obviously if you would cut corners in real life racing you’d get flagged so in the game we’ve applied grit, so when you come off the track your speed gets reduced. That’s especially important in Xbox Live games because we don’t want people to be able to cheat – cut corners, and stuff like that. So we’ve got are guys in the studio testing all that.
GI: How many courses in the game are modeled after real courses?
MW: There are over 50 different circuits in the game, of which 95% are fully licensed. The races take place all over Europe, Australia, and America. In the states we’ve got oval racing, so we’ve got Texas and Pike’s Peak, as well as courses like Road America and Laguna Seca. We have our own stock car, so you can do Stock Car oval racing, you can do open wheel oval racing. We don’t have the indy license. You can ride Ford pickup trucks in the oval as well.
GI: Is there any Formula One?
MW: There is. The aim of the game is to be a grand prix driver, and in the story the final race is a grand prix car. We do not have the F1 license.
GI: What kind of feedback did you get after the last game?
MW: From the last game, people have always wanted more damage. People have said that they want to completely destroy the car. Also the last game was realistic like this game is realistic, but it was quite unforgiving so if you made a mistake, that was it and you’d be off the track. So we’ve made a handling system that is a bit more forgiving for the player – but still feels realistic. This is not arcady racing like Burnout.
GI: Would you say that some of the balancing also goes into the AI for the other cars? Like if you wipeout you can get back into the race?
MW: We have a system where the AI knows exactly are, and if you get stuck and fall way behind the cars will slow down slightly – very slowly though – to allow you to catch up a bit. It depends on the difficulty setting you are at. The game has a rather unique adaptive difficulty. When you’re playing through career, you don’t select easy, medium, or hard or anything – everyone starts at the same difficulty. The game calculates how good of a driver you are. The difficulty changes accordingly. So if you won the first race and did well – if you’re seasoned at racing games – the game will up the difficulty a notch for the second race. If you do well again, it’ll notch the difficulty up. So it means that the player will find his own mean of difficulty without ever realizing it.
GI: Have you guys played Gran Turismo 4 Prologue?
MW: Yeah, we’ve got Prologue.
GI: What do you think?
MW: We’re a bit disappointed with Prologue, really. There’s over 40 people working on this game, and they’re all massive racing fans and car fans, so any racing games we love them to pieces. We were very disappointed with Prologue. I think the cars still look good, but a lot of us felt how they did the damage was really weak – not having any and just hitting invisible walls. I think what we did with Race Driver is we wanted to do a game which is exactly like how you see modern racing on TV, and how you imagine it to be. I think anything that takes that away, I don’t think is very good. When we developed the game we spoke to different racing drivers and people that race these cars on these tracks and got feedback about the handling and what the tracks are like. Like one guy has raced Skylines around this track and was saying you can take the cars off slightly, and on this corner, this is how to handle it.
GI: In the first person view, is there ever a cheating of collision?
MW: The game has a collision box around the car, and it definitely doesn’t change with the different camera views. I think it’s more of how it feels. On the open wheel racing the cars’ wheels stick out from the chassis, and you can interlock the cars, and move the cars close to one another and still race.
GI: How accurate is this game to the real thing, and how do you research this data?
MW: We get the track data from the owners of the tracks and when we send our photographers to the tracks to gather research data, we get to do a lap in a car with a video camera to see what the track looks like, and we have quite a big Codemasters team to get the information for us. It’s quite important for us to get it exactly right.
The audio for the cars, we actually get the real life cars and put them on what is called a rolling road, which has these big rolling drums under each wheel, and the car is strapped down and we ask a driver to get the car up to different speeds and different revs so that we’ve got all the rev ranges. We’ve got microphones in the exhausts, engine, cockpit, and tape all of our sound recordings that way. So like, this car, The Skyline, we’d get up to about 8000 revs. When you’re asking people to get cars like a 170,000lb Astin Martins, they kind of quite concerned (laughs).
GI: In the last game, didn’t they have some sort of guidance on how to customize and setup the different facets of the cars?
MW: What we’ve done is, well, we kind of felt that that was a bit weird, so what we want to do with this game is setup the cars initially at their peak performance for everyone. You can go down into the individual parts and tweak them. We didn’t think it was wise to tell you how to configure your car, and make them do it. We felt it kind of distressed the experience. So we wanted to keep away from it. It’s not about three settings – you can minutely change each one, and then test the car out, and that’ll affect the mechanics of the car.
GI: So if you’re given the best possible setup for each car, and you can go in a tweak things is there anyway – if you actually knew what you were doing – that you can get even more performance from the car?
MW: You could, yes. It comes down to your driving style. Even in the studio, six of us will play the game and we’ll watch everyone playing the game and everyone plays it slightly different. Some people like to get the car sideways a lot and use the handbrake, other people take the car smoothly through. So most of it comes down to your style of driving. Certain championships you are awarded by different styles. Some of the cars that you’re driving, you’ll need to be smooth with them, and if you start to get the backend out, the traction is lost and the front speed is lost. And actually when you race in the game, the tires on the wheels deform slightly. So as the car turns, the tire twists slightly on the hub as in real life. That’s the sort of detail and mechanics that we’ve gone through.
GI: Why did you decide to add semi truck racing to this game?
MW: What we felt when we looked at the cars to include in this game is, there’s nothing like truck racing. But are people going to buy a game that’s all about truck racing? We we sort of thought – rather than do that – if we do everything that’s going to be the most to racing fans. In the career mode, you encounter truck racing three times. There’s a lot of weight to these trucks, and as these vehicles move at such high speeds the weight continues to move over. So when the truck straightens up, the actual weight is still moving over on the truck. You kind of have to pre-empt that quite a lot. When you encounter this type of racing in the career you get a choice, so if you struggle with the trucks cause of their unique style, or if you don’t like this style of racing, you can race the Rally instead, so players will have choices in this game.
GI: Now since your vehicles take damage, we’ve heard from some game designers that they haven’t implemented damage in their racing games because the car manufacturers themselves have no allowed it. Did you run into those similar problems?
MW: Not really. One of the agreements that we have with the licenseing of these cars from the manufacturers is, while we can have damage with the cars and smash their cars up – some of these guys are very protective of their properties – we can’t actually kill the drivers. Our take on it is we’re trying to do a realistic game, and when you’re watching auto racing on TV, you see accidents and you see crashes. It’s part of the sport. And they’re like, okay, we’re cool with that. But if we did something that wasn’t quite realistic, it would break that promise with them.
GI: Is there any part of the vehicle that car manufacturers will not allow you to damage?
MW: The only thing we couldn’t do is kill the driver himself. We didn’t really want to do it anyway. We sort of thought that would be taking it to far. We kind of joked about it – like the driver getting splattered all over the windshield and stuff, but no, you won’t be able to do that.
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Temps en ligne : 44 Jours, 0 Heure, 59 Minutes, 46 Secondes en ligne
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21-02-2004 00:32
, pas eu le courage de mettre le volant ce soir pour le mode simulation pro.
