Project CARS 2

Ben Collins (Formally now as the Stig) heeft een stuk geschreven over de aanstaande Project CARS 2.
Een van de dingen die mij altijd is opgevallen aan PJC1 is dat de road feel aan of uit was. Ben onderschrijft dat gevoel en geeft aan dat PJC2 hierin veel gebalanceerder is en veel meer als het echte werk is.

Lees voer:
“No news is good news”.

With Project Cars that usually means the complaining phase is nearing an end and the physics chefs have their heads down in a sprint towards the finish line. We have all been quietly getting on with various testing regimes and it’s been an incredibly exciting couple of months working with the Dev team. The fruits of the labour of love are pretty stunning.

Here’s a break down of what we have been working on and why Project Cars 2 will be the ground breaking game we have all been hoping for.

With Project Cars 1 the core aim for many of us was for the Sim to have a lifelike, dynamic response just as you would expect of a real machine. The biggest challenge was getting the car to behave progressively at the limit so that you feel some front tyre slip on the way into the corner, and controllable oversteer on the way out.

We arrived at an amazing place in the end and could celebrate the addictive feeling of hustling a virtual version of everything from a Le Mans Protoype to a GT or ‘every day’ supercar.

For me the areas I still wanted to explore most were weather effects, oval racing and loose surfaces. Combined, those areas offer up pretty much three times the workload of the original game!

The Core Experience

The fundamental handling in PCARS 2 is further enhanced. We recently discovered a breakthrough in the way the tyre was behaving in roll, and by tweaking the way the tyre changes shape and bites the tarmac we have bridged the progression from understeer to oversteer.

The handling is now seamless and far more responsive, meaning you can recover from small mistakes or slides using micro adjustments in speed in much more the way I’m used to in the real world. This makes the “game” much more intuitive to drive, and more importantly it means that my lap times are becoming more competitive relative to the pesky Pro Sim Racers who have been destroying my lap times over the past five years.

Tommy Milner has also discovered that his real world ability as a Pro Racer for GM is paying dividends as a Sim racer with Project Cars 2. He surprised himself recently and put his progression down to the fact that new Sim is basically the same as his real Corvette GT racer.

What this shows is that Project Cars 2 is a BIG step change towards reality, and ultimately we hope that the Game will just be identical to real world driving. The gap now is very, very slight.

Drifting

The biggest challenge in Project Cars 1 was being able to control the cars when the rear broke loose. I lost count of how many times I virtually died by spinning at high speed and wrote about it on this Forum. We tamed the beast for PCARS 1, but when we pledged to “do drifting” properly in Project Cars 2 I applauded loudly and then thought, “how the hell do we pull it off.”

Up until last month I was anticipating making a political U-turn or maybe a comment like “what drifting..? Dunno what you’re talking about.” Because frankly it looked too damn hard to make it work.

2 weeks ago I finally got to sit down with AJ and Casey for a heavy Sim session. They had spent considerable amounts of time sifting through lots of different feedback and achieved ground breaking improvements with our in house drifting Lord, Vaughn Gittin Jr. But I still couldn’t drift properly or do a donut, the kind of 1st world problems that wake me up in the night screaming!

We spent several hours screeching and spinning around Silverstone while the boys spoke in a different coding language and changed physical values in the games engine. We finally had a eureka moment.. I found myself drifting in 3rd gear and winding up the wheelspin in full opposite lock, trimming my progress with the foot brake and feeling the exact elation I get in the real world from pitching the car, and timing the transitions from one corner to the next.

Drifting is going to be a lot of fun on PCARS2 and I’m looking forward to making some awesome videos of tandem drifting around exotic locations with our fellow Mad People.

Rallycross

Sliding consistently is essential for Rallycross and we’ve been fortunate to have Mitchell Dejong from the series get on board and feedback on his world. We’ve made great strides since the first prototypes of the Rally X cars went onto the Steam Portal and when we launched this to the press in London recently it’s where most people gravitated to.

As with drifting, all the real world controls behave as they should and even the hand brake is precisely modeled on the real thing. With WRX the cars are four-wheel drive, and when you pull the handbrake it automatically cuts drive to the rear axle, so that you can actually accelerate around the corner while pulling the handbrake to send you sideways. Astonishingly, it works perfectly on the Sim and bar a couple of tweaks to the landscapes I can’t imagine how we can improve on it.

Ice

The “working” group sent to Sweden at the start of the year really focused some minds on very slippery surfaces, and how we were making it TOO treacherous in game. One of the lads from Vesaro (who make the clever racing wheels) went out onto the ice track in a 500 BHP Mercedes with Lee Kirton of Bandai Namco in the passenger seat. He calmly chucked the car sideways and skated it around a lane of ice carved into the snow, then started linking slides from one corner to the next. Lee relaxed into his chair since, clearly, this kid had done this before. Actually, no, he hadn’t - he had been practicing the ice track on the Sim for just a few days!! [​IMG]

Our ice was too frictionless by comparison to the real thing, so that’s been fixed and the cars are now a lot more pitch sensitive. The key to driving on snow is putting weight on the tyres you want to grip. Braking shifts weight forward, generating grip in the front tyres and gives you additional turn in power. Now that this dynamic is working on the Sim, along with the drifting logic built into the physics, it’s a lotta fun.

Live Weather!

So what..?! This isn’t about Michael Fish telling you that it’s raining, or a beautifully rendered but superficial graphic showing rain drops on the windscreen. This is about the hard core business of racing that separates the men from the boys.

Gilles Villeneuve famously lapped Watkins Glen up to 12 seconds a lap faster than the rest of the F1 field back in the 80’s. People find that story hard to believe and so did I until I raced around Le Mans. I saw first hand how terrified some drivers were of racing in the rain, especially at night, and on several occasions saw drivers pit outside of their agreed window to throw the towel in.

Racing in the rain is something we rarely do, because any team manager with a brain won’t let you risk the car unless there’s no choice. As a result, drivers are poorly trained and poorly prepared for it.

In Project Cars 1 we established grip variations across different levels of rain, from light rain to a full on cyclone! We’ve tightened up the grip variation into something more realistic for Project Cars 2, and the conditions are now varied by a considerably more dangerous but real factor: standing water.

Puddles have done more for the sale of Nomex underpants than Vindaloo Curries have for padded loo roll. When you hit standing water at 100mph, or maybe 160mph, or higher – your back passage twitches faster than a badger’s nose. If your reflexes don’t do the right thing in that split second, then there’s every chance of having a colossal accident.

For me, this is the most exciting and ground breaking area of Project Cars 2. Puddles can and will form organically just as they would on a real track when the heavens open. The resulting wheelspin and sudden slides will put even the most seasoned racer to the test as never before. The puddle depths are tied to the graphics, so you’ll be scanning ahead for clues just as you would on a real track.

Indy Racing

As if there wasn’t enough going on with the all the new licenses, tracks and landscapes – we’re going Indy Racing too.

I had the privilege of racing Indy Lights with Scott Dixon as a team-mate in 1999 (millions of years ago!), and we drove the wheels of those things. To everyone’s surprise who raced Indy Lights, the Indycars themselves handled a hell of a lot better but the Lights cars provided a great grounding, if a masochistic one.

The scale of the challenge for both drivers and games developers with Indy racing is obvious as soon as you look at the calendar. Tight and fast street courses, short ovals, medium sized ovals and high speed ovals as well as road courses.

Teams have to radically adjust the cars from symmetrical setups one week, to a staggered suspension and with varying levels of downforce. Myself and Scott found ourselves at Milwaukee (1-mile medium speedway with minimal banking) one weekend and spent every second moaning to the engineers about the cars being ‘undriveable.’ They told us to man up and get on with it.

The cars were moving around a lot and every time you reached the apex bumps it was a miracle the car didn’t spin. I think I crashed on lap 8, slapped the wall at about 130mph, and Scott joined me in the wall about 5 laps later.

Back at Indianapolis our engineer apologized over a plate of chicken wings and explained that the boys left the road course dampers on both cars by mistake, hence why the cars were moving around more than they should have. Oh how we laughed..

Handling wise Project Cars 2 has got these cars dialed and I’m loving driving them, especially at Long Beach and at high speed on the ovals. With that core foundation in place we can race wheel-to-wheel and with VR you can really experience the brutality of the street circuits and the nuances of speedways.

The next level will likely involve drafting and slipstreaming past other cars, but not in an arcade way, in the Project Cars way. That means taking the same careful approach we took with Live Weather to ensure that the aerodynamic world of Indy racing behaves correctly on the Sim.

I was surprised by how addictive I became to oval racing and the strategy of drafting someone lap after lap until you wear them down, or find a way to leapfrog further up the speed chain. Oval racing has mostly been misunderstood in Europe but maybe the Sim experience we are building will open up this world up to a new generation.

We’ll keep tinkering all the way to launch but it can’t come soon enough for me, I can’t wait for Project Cars 2 to blow everyone’s doors off!

Ben Collins

Physics & Handling Consultant

Een van de meest gehate features ion Project Cars is dat als je contact maakt met een mede racer op de baan, je rechtdoor van de baan schiet.
Dat is niet zo heel erg realistisch..... of toch wel?

Weet nog niet... PC of PS4...Denk PS4 omdat ik ook GT Sport wil gaan doen zal dat denk ik mijn platform worden voor racen.