Getting Cool Cars Into Racing Games is Harder Than You Think

i'm 27 years old and i've been playing video games for as long as i can remember thanks to games like gran turismo forza and midnight club i knew the names and specs of hundreds of cars before i ever took my driving test but how did all those cars get into those games how did the programmers make them behave like the real thing and how is it done today i talked with real life developers at code masters the studio behind racing games like the f1 series grid and the upcoming dirt 5. i was able to get an inside look at how it all goes down from selecting the cars modeling them and making them handle like the real thing we're going to cover it all this video is brought to you by dirt 5 a game that i'm actually in in dirt 5 you can race everything from sprint cars rallycross gt unlimited trucks buggies muscle cars rock bouncers codemasters has lined up the ultimate off-road garage i'm so stoked to try all of them out there's a career mode with james and i there's online and four-player couch multiplayer you can play with your buddies and there's a new track editor mode i think i've owned almost every dirt game and i can't wait to play this one with you guys the game launches on november 6th for xbox one playstation 4 and pc with amplified edition early access beginning on november 3rd with amplified edition you get three cars unlocked from the get-go you get xp and currency boosts a bunch of other rewards plus access to every single post-launch edition to dirt 5 which is great not only that but if you buy dirt 5 on your current gen console like the ps4 and the xbox one you get a free upgrade to the next gen version later this year which is really awesome i want to thank dirt 5 and the fine people at codemasters for making this episode possible and telling me how to build a car in a racing game let's get into it the first consideration a studio needs to make is an obvious one what kind of game are they making if they're going for a niche discipline like kuno's simulation did with aceto corsa competizione then they only selected current gt3 and gt4 cars if your studio is calling your game midnight club 3 dub edition you better make sure every car in it can be pimped out with huge wheels underglow and wild graphics in dirt 5's case codemasters wanted a wide variety of off-road vehicles new and old to appeal to a global audience i asked them if there was any sort of distinction in the selection process when it came to super serious sim titles versus more laid-back arcade racers but it sounds like that doesn't really play a role for me i like playing racing games and you know if a sim or an arcade game has those kind of prestige brands whether that's porsche or one of the others i want to drive those cars whether it's arcade and sim the cool factor plays a big role as well went through each car properly and kind of picked them based on different things coolness value mainly and how much fun they would be to drive right and if you would really want to own one then that's something that makes a big difference to having it in our game i think that makes sense no one wants to drive a boring car so with the preliminary conceptual stuff out of the way what is the real first step in getting a car into a video game well it usually starts with the vehicle artists these are the people inside the studio who model and render all the cars in the game we'll talk about that process later at codemasters the vehicle artists work in tandem with the handling designers to make a list of the cars they want for the game this list is then sent out to the rest of the studio for feedback it's like a big company brainstorm to weed out the weaker picks and to pitch new ones a new list is drafted with all the feedback included but just because a company feels good about their list doesn't mean that they can start modeling the cars right away they have to go through the very important step of licensing a game studio has to buy a license to recreate someone else's design the manufacturer needs to give their stamp of approval knowing this codemaster's licensing team will then look at the list and let the art team know which cards they'll be able to get for sure smaller manufacturers who have never been in a video game before might be more enthusiastic about the process and more willing to help the studio wherever they can i mean yeah your car is going into a video game that's a pretty big deal just think about how many little cars became huge fan favorites because of video games the aerial atom the little red suzuki escudo from gran turismo or all the roof cars that made it into video games because porsche had an exclusive deal with electronic arts it's pretty standard that no manufacturer allows heavy virtual cabin damage no company wants to be seen as unsafe but some companies will go further by limiting which liveries and sponsors can be used on their cars because they might not want to be associated with certain brands some companies will go even further limiting which colors can be used on their cars well we had a manufacturer come back to us recently and they specifically requested us to move a pink remove a pink color from the livery editor that we have in there five because this manufacturer didn't want that color on their car you know that we then have to determine do we remove that for all vehicles or do we just remove it for that manufacturer i have to imagine that there's probably a legitimate legal reason for a manufacturer not wanting to be painted pink but it's still pretty funny so after the licensing team gives the go ahead for the list of cars the vehicle art team wants the hands-on work begins it's now time to get the cars into the game back in the 90s this was a fairly arduous process a lot of studios would head out to car shows with a camera a few rolls of film and a master list of cards they wanted if they found one of the cards they needed they'd shoot up to five rolls of film getting every angle and detail they could think of then they'd have to wait a week for the film to be developed and then scan the pictures into a pc and then they'd trace them with their modeling software it's a lot of work the process has changed a lot since then but the principle is the same instead of going out to car shows and hoping to run into the exact car you need the codemaster's vehicle art team needs to know of a physical example that they can use the team will then map the car with a handheld 3d scanner with dots placed all over the car we cover the whole entire card with markers and just go around slowly scanning the entire car with hand and then once it goes in the computer then the software will work out everything based on where the dots overlap and stuff and it'll generate the model think of it like a motion capture suit for a car now these scanners are great but aren't 100 accurate so the model needs to be smoothed out in the scanner software an easier route is to get the cad drawings directly from the manufacturer these are the same drawings that are used to build the car in real life so the studio can be certain that they're 100 accurate whether or not the car has to be scanned the vehicle art team still has to trace the 3d models with modeling software like maya or 3d max advances like 3d scanning were a huge step for racing games suddenly video game developers could get an exact analogous replica of a car instead of a studio's recreation based on photographs and technical drawings now that consoles and pcs are so freaking powerful approaching photo realism getting detailed down to the micron with a laser does make a difference in how your games look but sometimes cars are so rare that it's impossible to find a good example to scan so the vehicle art team has to rely on images like back in the day except now instead of relying on a film camera the artists just take the google instead all right so once the car has been modeled now what well it's time for one of the most important aspects of game design an unseen factor that arguably does more to convince you a car is real than your eyes do i'm talking sound some games have really good sound [Music] and others don't in the racing genre sound is of particular importance as the consoles have gotten more powerful visuals aren't the only stimuli that have gotten more impressive better processing speed and memory also makes for better sound the flat engine notes of yesteryear have been replaced with a symphony of multi-sample layered tracks of audio that accurately represent not only the engine but the exhaust differential straight cut gears and tires screeching against the pavement i remember reading an article in game pro many years ago about the sound team at polyphony digital recording a ton of cars for gran turismo 4 and thinking damn that's a lot of work for each game but these days the process is a little less stressful over the years many studios like codemasters have amassed their own sound catalogs with a veritable plethora of engine noises but according to codemaster's senior sound designer chris jojo that doesn't stop his team from going out in the field if a car is known for having a particularly distinct sound or quirk they need to record it [Applause] chris will place multiple microphones around the car inside and out usually in the engine bay and near the exhaust a newer technique is to also place advanced sound field microphones in the cabin which do an amazing job with surround sound recording adding these mics to the cabin will give the player enhanced sound when playing from the cockpit view [Music] if you're a purist like me dude you gotta be in there you gotta see that wheel turning you gotta see the dashboard that's the only way i can accurately get in the zone [Music] once the microphones are placed the car is driven under heavy load and under no load and then they send it we record it going driven in anger up and down through the gears so we're capturing those those modulations that gear changes clutch bike you know whatever it is so the car is going as close to the limit as it can and how it's configured so the idea is to capture everything i can from the car because everything is going to be used it might sound a little excessive to get this deep into just one aspect of the game but sound is one of your five senses and in a medium like gaming where only three of your senses are being used it's best to engage all of them the best you can to achieve that immersion and the audio engineers don't just focus on the car but how the car interacts with the virtual environment around it if your passive say barry is going for a tunnel brick walls structures like that will have highly reflective properties [Music] [Applause] everything like that helps to sell the car how the player perceives that and it's placed within the environment maybe it's because i focused on production sound in college but this stuff is really cool okay so we've modeled our car we've given it a voice with audio it looks and sounds like the real thing so how do we make it feel real every studio either uses an existing physics engine like unreal frostbite or unity there's a lot of engines and some studios like codemasters choose to build their own engine that they can tweak between games these engines are really complicated and i'm not smart enough to explain them but basically they simulate real world physics and the parameters can be modified to every game's individual needs arcade racers and sims might seem different on the surface with arcade racing's more laid back feel contrasting with the very serious tone of racing simulators but i was surprised to hear that codemasters uses the same engine for both types of games we're running a pretty detailed physics simulation under the hood so whether it's an archiped game or a simi game there's still quite a similar sim style model going on underneath of course sims and arcade style games play very differently and that's because of what craig calls helpers that's um the little artificial subtle helpers which just make the car a bit easier to drive a bit easier to land on jumps that sort of thing uh if you collide with another car we can just help you to all stay going down the track in the right direction we don't want the place to have a frustrating experience but what do the programmers actually do with the engine to make cars perform like their real-life counterparts we basically feed it with with real world data so we can get say the mass of the vehicle um the air resistance of it uh the grip of the tires the power and the torque curve uh the gear ratios for an awful lot of the cars that's available um either direct from the manufacturers or just troll the internet and you'll find it because these physics engines are becoming so advanced along with the computers running them the data that programmers input often result in an output that is the same as the real world performance which is pretty rare as you probably know realism is an important facet of the racing genre i mean what's the point of going to all the trouble of getting real cars in your game if they don't drive realistically but here's an interesting thing about realism it might not be real at all it's finding the data and getting in and tuning it to feel right that that's where the skill is and that's how different games are going to feel different obviously the designers are trying to target a certain feel dirt rally and f1 they're not trying to target an arcade feel they're trying to target you know extreme accuracy and realism or at least what people think is real because there's often quite a difference between being realistic and what people perceive as being realistic and people often want what their perception of realism is as opposed to what's actually real whoa another kind of prime example of what we've been talking about is the ice race says if you're driving on ice with studded tyres the cars in reality would have quite a lot of grip because you get a lot of traction from the metal studs digging into the ice that's not necessarily what your average player is going to expect though as soon as they see ice they're expecting to be drifting and sliding cars all over the place we have to come up with this balance where it's still fun and fairly fast but it's also got that that slidy character that people are expecting getting the feel of the game just right is a balancing act between making the cars believable and also having them match the tone of the game if you're making a super serious sim racer and all your cars are hard to drive congrats you're done but if you're making an arcade style racer that balance can be a little harder to find when you hit the mark between fun and realism that's when you've made a game that everyone can enjoy i've been playing racing games pretty much my whole life from mario kart on the super nintendo to gran turismo 2 midnight club 3 burnout forza eye racing to dirt rally 2 and so many games in between seeing that progression in real time seeing the quality of our favorite cars in game improve so dramatically has frankly been amazing but after talking to the people on the front line of racing game development i think we're just getting started we're definitely in a tipping point now i think the evolution of games consoles and what can be accomplished again i want to thank everyone at codemasters robert amrish craig and chris they're all great lads and i learned a lot please consider picking up dirt 5. i'm in the game james is in the game and i'm really proud of the work we did i seriously cannot wait to play this thing with you guys it's gonna be amazing be kind i'll see you next time

Channel: Donut Media

Views: 779,827

Keywords: Dirt 5, gran turismo, codemasters, dirt 5 interview, dirt 5 bts, racing games, sim racing, playstation, xbox, game development

Id: HwDwYsrqeHk

Length: 16min 29sec (989 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/LeifEriksonASDF]

Imagine how hard it must be for Forza. For the longest time you had to choose between the Horizon game that had Toyota and the Horizon game that had Volkswagen, cant have both until real recently.

[u/arup02]

Some interesting insights from the Codemasters team on how the process of licensing and programming cars works.

[u/MashMashSkid]

Donut Media is so entertaining I watch their videos and I'm not even a car guy. These guys do good work.

[u/DrBrogbo]

You know, as cool as it is to be able to drive Brand Name® Model® car in various racing games, it pisses me off to no end that licensing expires and it becomes impossible to legally obtain those games.

I would much rather never be able to race in a name brand car again if it meant that I could actually buy racing games that were more than 3 years old.

[u/JurassicBasset]

Is there any other videos or articles about this subject? I’ve always been interested in it, but there’s not much information out there.