Slightly Mad Studios been making racing games for the past 10 years, and they raised over $3 million dollars in crowd-funding to produce their own racing game called Project CARS. It’s a AAA racing simulation game that was first released in May 2015, and they recently added VR support to be one of the 30 Oculus Rift launch titles. I had a chance to catch up with creative director Andy Tudor and game director Stephen Viljoen at the Oculus Game Days to learn more about the extent that they’ve modeled the cars, tracks, physics, and dynamic weather systems in their goal towards creating the most authentic racing simulation.
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The VR support allows you to be fully immersed within a variety of different types of cars ranging from Indy cars, open wheel cars, track day cars, road cars, and karts. With VR you have full situational awareness in that you can see cars in your mirrors, you really get to feel the size and perspective of your car, and you can feel the full ambiance of each of the 35 unique locations and 110 different track layouts.
Stephen and Andy emphasized the extent to which they’ve gone in order to model how the grip of the tires change as they wear down, incorporating realistic sound field recordings, recreating actual tracks, creating physics simulations that take into account the atmospheric temperature and weight of the cars, and even factoring in a fully dynamic weather system and how the light changes throughout the day.
They claim that their simulation is accurate enough that there are actual race car drivers who use Project CARS to practice on different tracks, and here’s a video of Carmen Jorda using Project CARS in a racing simulator using three different 4K monitors.
The comfort rating for Project CARS is rated as intense, and I did experience some motion sickness from the brief time that I played the game. I am really sensitive to simulator sickness and there are some things in Project CARS that trigger it for me such as tilting the horizon line when going on a banked curve, suddenly stopping when crashing, or going up or down hills. All of these produce a disconnect between my visual and vestibular systems, and start to make me feel a little nauseous.
They do use a cockpit which helps to reduce vection, but the dense textures on the tracks still produce enough optical flow to potentially be another trigger for some people. This would be a difficult VR experience for me personally to play for an extended length of time, and so just be aware if you know that you’re susceptible to simulator sickness from VR locomotion. But if you’re not, then this is bound to be an intense racing experience — especially with the multiplayer mode.
There are also a lot of motion platform integrations that Project CARS has available, and so I imagine that incorporating more of the 4D haptic feedback and movements could actually make this an even more immersive and potentially more comfortable experience. I expect to see a lot of digital out of home entertainment arcades playing this game with a steering wheel, pedals, and a fully integrated motion platform.
Project CARS is being released on March 28th, and sells for $49.99
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:00.068] Kent Bye: My name is Kent Bye, and I host the Voices of VR podcast. And back in July of 2015, I quit my job to do this full time. I just love doing it. But I do need your support to help continue this podcast. I've got lots of great insights from GDC and a lot of other conferences that I want to travel to and kind of be the proxy of the virtual reality community. So if you do enjoy this podcast, then please do consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:42.090] Andy Tudor: I'm Andy Chew, I'm the Creative Director at Slightly Mad Studios. And yeah, we're here at the Oculus Rift game day to announce that Project Cars is going to be a key launch title there on day one, March 28th on the Oculus Store.
[00:00:55.687] Stephen Viljoen: I'm Steven Fulyun, I'm Game Director on Project R's franchise and very excited to be and showing what we're doing in VR, just staying ahead of the curve where everybody else is as far as the racing genre go and getting people in a game in a way that just simply wasn't possible before.
[00:01:11.612] Kent Bye: Yeah, so maybe you could give me a little bit of background in terms of, you know, where this game was coming from and the decision to add VR to it.
[00:01:19.080] Andy Tudor: Yeah, so we've got a long history of making racing games in our studio. We've been making racing games for over 10 years. Back in the day with GTR, GTR2, GT Legends, we're most known for Need for Speed and Need for Speed Shift and Shift 2 Unleashed. And in 2011 we just wanted to do our own thing. We wanted to make our own game, start our own franchise, our own IP. So we looked directly to the gamers to do that. So we wholly crowdfunded the title. Over 30,000 people helped us make this game. We raised 3.2 million dollars. And what we said was that if you help us make this game, we will pay you back depending on the success of the game. So it was one of the first titles out there, still is one of the first titles out there, which is a truly AAA crowdfunded title that is a boxed product on a shelf that you can actually buy, you know. And this was long before Kickstarter became so infamous with that kind of stuff now. And still to this day, we're one of the only games where people could talk to us on a daily basis. So even on Kickstarter, if I look on the projects that I'm backing myself, I get a monthly report maybe. It was totally different on ours. On ours, you could actually talk to us day by day on a forum system, you could vote on key decisions, you could play the game every day, every week, every month. You could give us feedback on things, people going out to tracks, taking reference photos for us, getting access to cars that we didn't have access to ourselves, taking photos and things like that there. Giving us feedback on what they wanted to see in the game, telling us how bad the game was and where we needed to improve over the years and things like that. And then we released in May 2015, last year, with our fingers crossed that what the community had moulded with us was going to be an epic game. We felt the risks were minimal because, as I said, we've had the community following us and helping us make this game the entire time. We hope that what we'd made was pretty cool. And yeah, we released in May and it received critical acclaim. The highest rated racing game on PlayStation 4, sold incredibly well worldwide. And ever since, we've been supporting the game with brand new content, 12K support. Here we are today with VR, we're the most successful racing eSport out there. And yeah, now Oculus Rift adds a kind of final piece of the puzzle.
[00:03:33.961] Kent Bye: And so what makes a good racing game?
[00:03:36.196] Stephen Viljoen: So inside the sub-genre of racing games you have various sub-sub-genres. Of course you have like your arcade style games. We've always gone for the authentic driving simulator experience. And where we differ from games like Gran Turismo and Forza and so on is where they're mostly focused on car collecting and grinding your way through that. We're simulating the experience of being a motorsport driver. So we believe that a good racing game is when you can put somebody in a car and give them an authentic experience because driving is something that most people do in real life so they already have that association with roughly what it should feel like what it should look like which is now very important in VR of course because where previously we didn't have to worry about things like scale because the size of the car would change depending on the size of your TV. So now in VR, the scale is absolutely critical. You need to make sure that when you're in the car, sat in the car, it looks like what you would expect it to look size-wise, perspective, and the way that it reacts to your head movement and so forth, that all of that is there and accurate. So all of these things contribute in VR to make a great racing experience when you get it right. When you don't, then it just all breaks down, because again, people can immediately recognize when things aren't right because they know from real world experience. We've gone for an authentic racing experience right from the beginning in a sense of that we model the physics of the cars and the tires and the way that it looks, the way that it sounds and all that accurately, but we also do an holistic approach where everything is accurately modeled. The tracks are accurately modeled down to the bumps on the road surface, We model atmospheric temperature, and that's not just saying, well, you know, it's 22 degrees outside. That actually affects the track surface temperature, which affects your grip. It affects the pressure inside the tires, which also affects their wear rate, for example, on the tires. We do a simulation of full 24-hour day-night cycle, so you can have a full endurance race, where you start off, like, midday and play through the night and through the other one. You can scale that, so you can do it all, have that same experience, but have it in two hours. We have a fully dynamic weather system so you can for example start off in like slightly cloudy it gets clear but then the clouds start rolling back and starts raining and that changes again and so forth throughout the course of the race. So bringing all of those pieces together allow us to let the player have a fully authentic racing experience because a real world race driver has has to deal with all of those things when it's out there on the racetrack. And now with VR, we can put you in a situation where you feel like you're wearing a race helmet, you have the same sort of slightly restricted field of view as what you would do if you were wearing a race helmet, and then you find yourself suddenly in the cockpit of the car so you have that full situational awareness that is so critical to a real world race driver where he can very quickly glance in the mirrors and find his apex when he enters a corner, as he hits the apex find his exit point on the opposite side of the road and then find his line nicely, check exactly where the opponents are and all of this together we believe just puts Project CARS in a league above anything else out there right now.
[00:06:42.510] Kent Bye: And so will there be multiplayer support for Project CARS?
[00:06:46.551] Stephen Viljoen: Yes, absolutely. So we have like 16 player support already now on Oculus from day one. You'll be able to play it all in VR. You'd be able to matchmake with buddies who aren't playing in VR at that time. But yeah, so full multiplayer support. And if you don't have enough buddies around and you want to have a full field experience, you can actually have the rest of the field, for example, filled up with AI opponents. So you can have a combination of, you know, human players and AI players as well.
[00:07:13.222] Kent Bye: So how many different tracks are there in Project CARS?
[00:07:16.065] Andy Tudor: So Project CARS has got the largest track roster of any game, so it's got 35 unique locations, so 35 specific places from around the world, and 110 layouts of those different things as well. Traditionally, we would never talk about numbers. You never talk about how many guns there are in Call of Duty or how many tanks there are in World of Tanks or something like that. But it is important, I guess, to start talking about those kind of things because they are unique experiences. You can pick any car and go into any track, and you spend a good few hours trying to master a track, or even longer if it's something like the Nordschleife or something like that. So yeah, there's a lot of content in there when you talk about career mode and multiplayer and the actual number of cars in there, number of tracks and stuff like that, and the variety of motorsports, everything from Indy cars, to stock cars, to touring cars, to GT cars, to open wheel cars, to track day cars, to road cars, to karts, like how many is that? Like seven, eight different disciplines right there already. So yeah, there's a lot of stuff in there.
[00:08:10.690] Kent Bye: So are you modeling the weight of the cars as well so that as you are going through the different tracks they would behave differently on the track?
[00:08:17.590] Andy Tudor: I'll take this one. So I always like breaking down the fourth wall for this stuff. So yeah, I hope that one day journalists will never ask me this question in future because I think it's important for everyone out there to realize that we do things properly. So it's a silly question. So do we model the weight? I'm not saying you are silly for asking it, but it's like, yeah, absolutely. There's no area of leeway at all. We have to get the references from the car manufacturers. We have to make them absolutely perfect because ultimately they have to approve it as well. We get the technical data from the car manufacturers as well. We take millions of photos and things like that. Where possible we go and actually sit in the cars and, you know, especially for VR check the actual scale of things is correct. We attach cameras and microphones to the cars to get the actual audio and noise and things like that too. So yeah, in the future I hope people will realize that it's just a one-to-one recreation. We've got the Pagani Huayra BC, which we announced recently for the Game of the Year edition version of the game. and we've got a long-standing history with Pagani that they're only making 20 of those so only 20 people will ever get to drive that in real life but yet millions of people get to drive it in the game and therefore especially with VR like you want to make sure that in VR you can sit there and experience exactly how that car looks like in real life because one day Mr. Horatio Pagani himself will want to sit there in VR and also he'll be able to tell us whether the stitching is wrong or whether the carbon fiber on the interior or something like that is wrong, he will know, right? And therefore we want that level of authenticity that the digital craftsmanship that goes into making these things is exactly the same as the real world craftsmanship.
[00:10:01.037] Kent Bye: What are some of the questions that you never get asked but you always want to talk about?
[00:10:04.355] Stephen Viljoen: Well there are a lot of little things like that and interestingly enough it's the sort of stuff like when you do it right people don't notice because they expect that's how the world works it's when it doesn't work right that it stands out so there are many many things some of the stuff I've spoken about now previously like you know the ambient temperature affecting your car handling or the way that the rain has an effect on the road surface, which, when it does work right, people just go, yeah, well, that's how I would experience it in real life. When it doesn't work right, people are quick to point it out. So yes, in so many areas, like, for example, with the damage, we've modeled detail under the surface that a lot of people won't ever notice, because you only see it if you break off panels and you take the time to go notice it, but we wanted to make sure that it's there and it's authentic, it's accurate to what the car looks like in real life. The same with the way that the tyre physics work and the way that contact patches and the scrubbing and the amount of resistance change depending on what type of surface you're driving on. Little details like that that is just not noticed because it works. But it's very satisfying, you know, it's sort of like we know it's in there and we know it's working and we're happy because people aren't crying out about it because it's just right.
[00:11:19.023] Andy Tudor: I think I'm most proud of the feedback loop that we're getting now. So if you think of where racing games used to come from, from OutRun and Ridge Racer and things like that, now we've got a feedback loop where a kid plays the game, my nephew, my niece, whatever, They get really good at the game. They then decide to spend some money and get a wheel. They get even better at the game. On the other side, ourselves, we've got our own expertise and heritage of making racing games and stuff like that. We've got the real drivers who have been helping us as well. We've now got young drivers who don't get a chance to actually go to some of these tracks using Project Cars as a training tool for them, you know, in their early careers that they're starting. We've got veteran and pro racers who are using the game not just for fun but also to practice for their real life events that are happening. They helped us make the game and as I said on the other side you've got these guys who are taking it to the pro level like some of our eSport guys as you know as well and they're comparable with the real racing drivers now and you know you could put them in a race together and they'd be very similar so we've got this real kind of mixing pot of young people, old people, veterans, newcomers all playing the game and all managing to have a great time with it and finding their level of skill and competition within the game and yeah kind of like the sky's the limit now.
[00:12:37.029] Kent Bye: So, because you're trying to simulate a process of racing a game, there's a lot of strategic decisions that you have to make over the course of an entire race that, you know, if you're doing just a few laps, you may not have to make those same type of decisions. So maybe you could talk a bit about the strategies and decisions that you have in terms of the gameplay of the game.
[00:12:55.311] Stephen Viljoen: being a motorsport simulator we have multi-class races or we have class races where not everybody are in identical cars for example you may have a gt3 field where you have nine or ten different car models now each one of those types of cars have different behavioral aspects for example the one might be lighter on fuel the other one might be better on by default faster straight but doesn't have quite the handling of the other one the other one might be heavier on its tire so first of all when you go into like for example a three-hour race you want to consider those things in how it's gonna play off in your strategy Then what you can do in Project Cars, for example, you go into the pits and you pre-configure things. You would say, okay, I'm going to start off with half a fuel tank because I know I'm going to need to change tires during the race. My tires are not going to last. So I'm going to start off with half a fuel tank and then come in about maybe two-thirds through the race, get a fresh set of tires and have that final advantage. being on fresh tyres and only have like half a fuel load in my tank. You may go and say well I'm going to pick this car because it's lighter on fuel so I may go get away with only a single fuel tank so I start off with a heavier fuel tank but I'm still going to need to change tyres, it still means my pit stop is going to be quicker but initially I'm going to be heavier on fuel but at the end I'm going to have the lightest amount of fuel. So it all plays into the strategy and then of course there's the dynamic weather system so you don't know, it may start raining halfway through the race throws all of that out the window or there may be a major incident and it blocks all the people up and now you've had an advantage of 10 seconds because you started off on the light fuel load and now the whole field is right here with you again. We do all of that in Project Cars. You don't have to experience that because what we do is we allow you to scale the length of the races so you can have a race that when you're playing in career mode for example you can go say Each round of this championship, I only want to be five laps. But if you wanted to, you could set it to full duration, so it will be a proper hour and a half race, every one. So, the strategy is there and it works properly just like it does in real life, but you don't have to do that if you don't want to. It's there for those people who do want to experience that, and yeah, it's all there and working properly.
[00:15:05.653] Kent Bye: And so, is this primarily a gamepad game, or do you also have integrations with steering wheel peripherals?
[00:15:12.256] Andy Tudor: No, we support over, I mean, Project Cars has always said it's one of the most technically advanced games out there. I mean, VR is one part of that. The game also runs at 12K as well. It supports second screen apps as well. I think there's over 15 different apps that people have made out there for the game. And we also support over 40 different wheels from all the major manufacturers as well, including the very latest ones as well. So, I mean, the racing genre has always been more akin to peripherals you know whether it's seats or wheels or headsets or apparel you know so I think you know VR is like the last step of that way you actually have a helmet so yeah if you've got a wheel at home it'll work with project cars.
[00:15:52.567] Kent Bye: And have you also been doing some, like, 4D effects, like a chair where you're moving around? Maybe talk a bit about that.
[00:15:57.110] Stephen Viljoen: So actually, right, dating all the way back to GTR, we've had a very good working relationship with manufacturers of motion platforms. And particularly, originally, it was with a company called D-Box. And we've supported them all the way through. And now in Project CARS, we also support other motion platform manufacturers. But it is an incredible experience when you do this in VR and you're in a motion platform and you have all those actual physical hints as well of what the car is doing so we can simulate exactly what happens to it because we have this detailed simulation already of what the suspension of your car is doing and the tires so when we hook that up with a motion platform you actually get to experience how the car would move if you were sitting in the real one because we feed what's happening in the physics engine with the suspension into the actuators of the motion platform so they recreate the exact motion that your car would be doing if you were out on the real racetrack. So yeah, it's a great experience. And if you do that with a steering wheel and VR, it's just a mind-blowing experience.
[00:16:57.558] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:17:03.884] Andy Tudor: I mean, it's a broad question, isn't it? I mean, it's been coming for lots of years, you know. I remember Lawnmower Man, you know, for example. I remember my lecturers back at school, at university, who were, like, talking about VR back in the day. And then finally, with Oculus Rift kind of announcing when they did, to where we are now, it's been a considerable amount of time, too. So for me, personally, the possibilities are endless for this stuff. If you imagine Second Life, for example, in VR, you can imagine people just living their entire lives in there, essentially, going to the virtual dominoes and having it arrive at your door and things like that. Imagine Facebook in VR, be able to do that. We talk about PlayStation Home. I used to work at Sony and worked on PlayStation Home. PlayStation Home is a virtual, space that you live in and have your own apartment, invite your avatar friends to come over and things like that and fill your house with your own collectibles. People could happily live in VR, I'm sure. We're only the first generation of games currently, but if you look back on previous generations of platforms like PlayStation 1, 2, 3, the quality of games and the added immersion and taking advantage of the hardware and things like that only gets better over time. So I think over time we're going to see some brilliant things that happen in VR that we're only scratching the surface of here.
[00:18:22.315] Stephen Viljoen: What we've done here with Project Cars, the way I look at it is that it's sort of like we're setting foot on the shores of a new continent of discovery and possibilities of what can be done. Even with this current generation of VR hardware, we are going to be on a very steep upslope of just new things that we're going to, oh we can do that, oh this, oh I didn't even think of that because we're so set in a mindset of having to be creative within the context of what you can do on a flat screen that it's just going to take time to break out of that. So initially I see a bit of a hold back on getting to the full potential of just this generation of VR being you know in the minds of the designers and trying to think from a whole new clean slate. It's also a good thing though that people temper their expectations of this generation and the next few generations of VR because Certain experiences are going to work really well initially. Others are not going to be what people expect them to be. We're a while away before you are going to have the very basic sensation of walking through a field of long grass and feeling it against your legs and picking up all the tiny details. But it will eventually get there. It's a logical conclusion of the technology of where it's going. And that's not a negative thing. If it was just suddenly like that, I don't think most people's psyches would be able to handle it. We'd just all be lost somewhere. So it's a good thing. It's a good thing that we have that and that we're going to have this upward curve as we go through the various generations of VR. But it's hugely potential for things like in tourism, for example. I mean, just imagine you can just go to like, you know, visit any museum around the world without actually going there with the advent of photogrammetry and the details that they can do in that where they can capture historical objects that are going to be lost to us in time. and you'd be able to just have those there and walk around them as if they were here in front of you and see all the little detail and all that recreation of that. On a more personal level for people there's going to be things like capturing photos where you actually capture a full like the person is sitting over there or a short video clip that is a full 360 3D. There are going to be some interesting social fallout from that. For example, if you consider what it's going to be like to have a conversation again with somebody who has passed away already, that was very close to you. How are people going to handle that? There is a lot of things we don't know how it's going to work for people, but it's exciting. It's exciting. It's something that is unlike anything else we've experienced. And for us to be the generation, to be the pioneers into this, I think is absolutely incredible.
[00:20:59.546] Kent Bye: Anything else that's left unsaid that you guys would like to say?
[00:21:02.406] Andy Tudor: No, just look out for the game when it comes out March 28th. And soon after, all the versions of the Oculus version will be upgraded to the Game of the Year edition when that comes out as well. Okay, awesome. Well, thank you so much. Thanks very much.
[00:21:13.777] Stephen Viljoen: Bye bye. Thank you so much for taking the time to come sit with us. Enjoyed it.
[00:21:17.761] Kent Bye: And thank you for listening. If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
