25/05/2010
NEWS STORY
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It has been several years in the making but in September F1 will finally have a new videogame for the top-level games consoles from Sony and Microsoft. In March a slew of screenshots were released by the boffins at Codemasters, which is programming the new game, and, in addition to their uncanny realism, the other talking point they raised in the fan community was that they showed 2009 cars (above).
Would the game feature 2009 cars? Was there enough time to include the 2010 cars? Was this a slip up? These were the kind of questions which fans asked before Codemasters clarified that the programmers simply honed their skills on the 2009 versions before the 2010 cars had been launched. Pitpass can now reveal, courtesy of an article by our business editor Chris Sylt in The Paddock magazine, that the 2009 cars are already a thing of the past.
"In order to meet the game launch date, the cars need to be finished and fully working in game by mid-May," Nick Phillips, Codemasters' lead vehicle artist told Sylt. Giving a taste of the delights game players can expect, he adds that "all the externally visible movable parts, such as the suspension components, are modelled individually so they will behave correctly in game. Similarly, parts that we want to break off in crashes are modelled separately. We also model some internal components so that they can be revealed behind damage."
Even with the processing power of today's games consoles, it takes some clever computing trickery to get the F1 game mirroring reality as closely as it does. "While the player-controlled car will always show the highest level of detail, the computer-controlled cars don't need to," says Phillips. He explains that Codemasters creates four levels of opponents' cars, each with less detail, and this reduces the strain on the console's processor which allows the game to run smoothly at all times.
"We also create a low resolution version of the car that appears in the wing mirrors," says Phillips adding "a higher resolution version of the steering wheel with functional instrumentation is also created for when you are sitting in the cockpit."
The final touch to the cars is fine tuning the damage model. "When setting up the damage, we try to keep close to real world parameters, but there's a fair amount of artistic licence," explains Phillips. "If we kept to real-world damage physics it wouldn't be long before your car was un-driveable so we have to balance gameplay and believability." It is the ideal aim to have.