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PS3 Info Page Goes LIVE
LINK -- August 5th
Codemasters CONFIRM F1 2009 will be a "SIM"
-- July 7th
"GRID and
DiRT are aimed at an arcade audience and they do that very well.
F1 has different requirements and will get a completely
different treatment from our in-house team, including full on
sim options, physics, rules and regs etc. We will also have
arcade requirements catered for as well. How this will be split
we do not know yet, but split it will be."
....... From the Executive Producer of GRID
Here’s the second part of our interview with Race Driver:
GRID senior producer, Clive Moody. Here, he tells us all about
the game’s ludicrously complex damage modeling system, hints at
downloadable content and touches on how Codemasters will
approach its forthcoming F1 title…
Threespeech: The GRID damage model is very
impressive…
CM: It’s been a long haul getting there! But
then, we have a lot of experience with damage modeling, it’s
always been a feature of the TOCA and Race Driver games, and we
just keep refining and perfecting it. We’ve actually put pretty
much an entirely new damage system in Grid – and again it’s
something that the Ego engine has allowed us to do. It’s a
different system to what you saw in CMR Dirt…
Threespeech: In what way?
CM: Just in the way that the damage
functions. I mean, the slow motion is an important element of
it, and in order to do that, there’s been a fundamental step
change in the way that we calculate the deformation. Previously,
the car would collide with an object and you’d have a single
calculation that would ascertain the damage – a two-step
function. Now we’re doing that as multiple calculations – the
damage calculation is being applied for every single frame of
the game, so it’s bending and crumpling frame by frame. And what
that allows us to do is slow the process down and let you watch
the whole thing happening in slow motion. It’s a big change, and
a complicated system, but realism is important.
Key to this is real-life references – that’s always our first
port of call with things like damage systems. We have to
understand how these cars damage in real-life, and understand
the materials that the cars are made from, so if it’s metal,
it’s going to bend, it’s going to crumple up and deform. If it’s
plastic or fibre glass, they don’t tend to bend, they have a
little bit of give and then they shatter, glass is always going
to shatter… we have to get all of those materials correct as
well – not only as part of the car model but as part of the
damage model as well. So when you do have a collision, things
bend, break, crack and explode in a realistic way.
Threespeech: Apparently, in real-life, the
open wheel cars are designed to break apart into sections, and
this happens in your game as a result of the damage modeling…
CM: Absolutely, and that’s part of it.
That’s part of understanding how this car is going to react in a
collision situation, when unusual forces are applied to it.
That’s modeled in from day one - when the car artists start on
it, they’re going to be setting up that car in a way that… the
wheels will come off on an open wheeler in a way they wouldn’t
necessarily come off in, say, a touring car where it’s all about
the panels bending and buckling…
Threespeech: Race Driver Grid offers a range
of multiplayer options. How important do you feel it is to
encourage and maintain an online community?
CM: Community is really important and it’s
something we take very seriously. We took a bit of stick on CMR
Dirt for not having much of an online mode in there and that’s
something we’ve really tried to address with Grid – we’ve put
solid online component in there. We also have our dedicated
community liaison people who are always on the forums, always
answering questions and keeping the enthusiasm alive out there,
and letting people know what we’re doing, what plans we’ve got.
Downloadable content IS going to happen for this game, and
that’s not necessarily content in terms of extra cars or tracks,
that can be additional features or functionality as well. We’re
just working it out at the moment, what that’s going to include.
Threespeech: So you have some new ideas for
downloadable content?
CM: We do have some new ideas. There’s also
a lot of stuff where, when you’re making a game, there’s always
stuff you genuinely can’t fit in the time. Some of those ideas
are still there and we’d love to get them in – some for the
online community and some for the single-player game.
Threespeech: You’ll be supporting this title with new
content for quite a while?
CM: Yes, we definitely do want to. I mean,
it’s going to be a while before there’s another one – we’ll see
how well this one does and how it’s received by the public. We
definitely want to maintain support for the game, to keep people
interested and excited. We want to be there in 12 months time,
still challenging people online.
Threespeech: So with Ego, you’ve talked
about it being an evolving engine… is Grid very much the start
of a new journey?
CM: Yes, and it’s a long haul to be honest.
It’ll be continually improved. There are very big plans at our
central technology team, who own this product, they provide the
technology to all of development within Codemasters – so it’s
not only going into our racing titles, you’ll also see Ego in
our action titles – Operation Flashpoint 2, for example, uses a
slightly different arm of the Ego engine. It’s split into two
elements: Ego Racing and Ego Action. They have the same
fundamental core underneath, and then genre specific elements
are built on top. So obviously for Ego Racing, there’s a car
handling model in there, whereas Ego Action has things like
ballistics physics. And we can keep adding on elements for
different types of games.
Threespeech: How do you think you’ll change
things for a pure F1 game? Is that going to be a new challenge,
considering you’re working with one motorsport?
CM: Definitely. The fans are going to expect
something a little bit different in terms of how we represent
it. If you look at previous F1 games, they’ve steered down
exactly the same path in terms of their presentation and maybe
the handling as well, and we’d love to think we can do something
to refresh the brand a little bit, to do things a little bit
differently.
Threespeech: In what ways?
CM: Obviously there’s a lot of planning to
go. I do think as well with an F1 game, getting the simulation
aspect of it spot on is incredibly important. We have to cater
for a possibly even wider audience than we do with a game like
Grid – we need that full-on simulation for people who really
like to get down to the nuts and bolts, doing all the very fine
adjustments on their car. But similarly, to appeal to a wider
audience, we need to make it simple and playable enough for
those who just want to have some great, fun racing. There’s a
real challenge there to try and satisfy all parties. I’m an F1
fan, I love it, but when it comes to racing games I don’t really
want to get down to the fine detail – as a gamer I want to get
in an have that experience, to feel like a Lewis Hamilton or a
Kimi Räikkönen, a racing hero, that’s the important thing we
need to get across.
Threespeech: It seems a lot of other driving
games are moving toward this, openworld theme, but Codemasters
now seems to be moving in a different direction, toward short,
sharp racing experiences…
CM: I think there’s always going to be a
place for just full-on exciting, aggressive, action-packed
racing, it’s what we do well, it’s what we do brilliantly and I
don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t continue to do it
brilliantly.
---------------
Codemasters’ latest driving epic drifts sideways and at great
speed onto shop shelves today. To celebrate its release we talk
to senior producer, Clive Moody, about the design philosophy
behind the game, and the team’s passionate love of smoke
effects…
Threespeech: First of all, can you explain
the high concept behind the game? What did you intend when you
started out?
CM: When we first started looking at the
design, we had a good long look at all the racing games around
at the time, and what they were doing. What we came to see was,
they were less about the racing itself and more about the
ancillary activities: modding the car or putting another paint
job on it. From that point we just thought, well let’s get back
to what a good racing game is all about, and that’s everything
that happens from the point that the lights change on the
starting grid, through to the chequered flag. We wanted to
distil it down into five or six minute chunks of action. The
line that’s been spun is, ‘it’s all about the race’, and it very
much is.
Threespeech: In what ways does the Ego
engine exploit new technology to provide a more exciting racing
experience?
CM: That’s a big question. I should start by
giving you a quick history on where Ego has come from. It’s been
two years in development and somewhere in the region of 50-60
engineers have worked on it. The fruits of the engine were seen
in CMR Dirt, but it’s an evolutionary piece of software and it’s
evolving all the time.
Beneath the obvious stuff, the next-gen visuals, the
high-definition graphics and sound, is all the maths, the clever
stuff, in terms of the physics model – and that’s not just the
physics of the cars themselves and the way they handles, it’s
the physics of every object around the track. So when you smash
into a tyre wall, it’ not just a solid block, they are all
individual tyres – they bounce, they explode. And then the third
element that’s hugely improved in Ego is the AI. Every single
car on that track is fully aware of what’s going on around it,
they’re aware of the space, aware, not only of the racing line,
but of all the other lines they could take in order to attempt
an overtaking manoeuvre. That’s coupled in with driver abilities
and attributes – there are dozens of parameters that define how
that driver will behave, how he will perform in the race, his
aggression level, is he prone to errors, is he going to get
tired as the race goes on and possibly make more mistakes, how
well does he corner? Is he a late braker? Does he brake early
and go in gingerly? All those elements come together within Ego
to define what we can do with the game.
Threespeech: Are there new avenues of
physics that have been opened up to you with this console
generation?
CM: Definitely. I think the key thing is the
frequency with which you can actually run the physics. The
underlying physics engine now runs at 1000hz – on previous
platforms we might have been running at 60Hz, so we’re able to
update the car handling and the general car physics much faster,
which means it’s a much more accurate and realistic simulation.
With this system we know that, fundamentally, the cars are
always going to behave correctly on the track.
Threespeech: You don’t seem to have gone
merely for a photographic representation of reality with Grid –
you have an art tool called ‘Enhance Client’ which includes a
range of post process effects so you can add tints and increase
elements such as contrast and brightness for the screen image.
Are you going for more of a stylised look with the game?
Absolutely. We’re trying to represent realism, but we want to
enhance that, we want to exaggerate it. It’s a terrible cliché
to compare games with movies, but when you go to the cinema,
everything’s bigger, everything’s exaggerated, everything’s more
colourful, explosions and crashes are… well, they’re just bigger
than they are in real-life. And we’ve taken that approach with
the game, because it adds to the drama, it adds to the
excitement, and visually it’s stimulating as well.
Threespeech: Does this sense of ‘enhanced
reality’ extend to the handling? What do you aim for first,
authenticity or excitement?
CM: You have to look at both – there’s a really fine balance
between what would be an ultra realistic handling model and
something that most gamers are going to enjoy. We don’t claim to
sit in pure sim territory with this game, but by the same token
we’re not sitting at the low-end of the arcade market. What we
strive for, our goal and our vision, is realistic handling that
feels like it behaves properly, but is accessible to the widest
possible audience. It feels like you’re driving a real race car,
but it’s pared back a little bit to make it playable. You put
the average person in a race car and they’re going to go off the
track on the first corner – they just wouldn’t be able to handle
it.
And for those people who do want a slightly more hardcore
experience, they can turn off the assists, they can turn off the
traction control, the braking assists, the steering assists and
that brings it much more toward a proper simulation.
Threespeech: The game is full of lovely
little graphical effects. Lots of high dynamic range lighting,
reflections and smoke. What are some of the team’s favourite
graphical frills and where do you feel you’ve innovated?
CM: I love the lighting we’ve achieved
through the different environments and the different feel that
we’ve got – there are some great sunlight effects. Some of it is
pure mathematical simulation of the lighting and some of it is…
smoke and mirrors if you like, a combination of art and
real-life physics.
One of the areas we’re really proud of is the smoke – just
the amount of smoke you can kick up. This was essential really
because drifting is all about getting the car sideways and
losing traction; you automatically get a lot of tyre smoke and
we had to find a way of representing that. So we worked hard on
getting literally screens full of billowing smoke. You’ll see
that when you play it, sometimes you’re really taking a leap of
faith, you can’t see what’s happening on the next corner –
you’re driving blind because there’s a wall of smoke in front of
you. It’s really fun and exciting.
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