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MotorGP Racer Feature Feature
00/12/0000
Derek dela Fuente met up with four members of the Climax development crew in a serious chat about MotorGP Racer on the PC/Xbox & PlayStation 2.
TVG: MotorGP Racer is on both PC and XBOX. What in essence will be the main differences between the two formats?
Shawn Hargreaves ā“ Lead Programmer: We have a single team doing both versions. Some bits of the code are different, but a lot of it can be shared, and even when things do need to be different, it is much quicker to write a PC version of something if youāve just finished doing it on the Xbox (or vice versa). So it would be silly to have two different teams doing basically the same thing on the two machines!
The problem with making a PC game is deciding what spec of machine to aim for, because every PC is slightly different. The Xbox is great as it gives you a fixed piece of hardware, so you know exactly how far you can push it while still keeping a good frame rate. With this in mind, we lead the project on Xbox, making it run as well as possible and adding as many effects as we can, and then convert this to the PC. So if you have a similar spec PC to an Xbox, it will look just as good. If your PC is more powerful than an Xbox, you will get the same effects but can run in higher resolutions and with better antialiasing. If you have a less powerful PC, we will drop some of the effects and reduce the amount of graphical detail.
The only thing we couldnāt do at all on PC is a few of the special effects rendering modes from the Xbox version, like the sketch mode, emboss filter, and so on.
Jon Gibson ā“ Lead Designer: Weāve attempted to maintain consistency between the designs of both the PC and the Xbox titles, although due to technical differences between the two platforms certain graphical changes have needed to be implemented (such as the omission of special effects rendering modes from the PC version).
The Xbox version has been our leading format, so the PC version doesnāt feature many extras, apart from the networking options this platform allows us (up to 20 people can play simultaneously over the internet or LAN).
Of course, the quality and performance of the PC version will largely depend upon individual setups, but if youāve got a PC with a comparable spec to an Xbox, itāll be pretty much the same game (although the resolution will obviously be higher).
What new, exciting, innovative ideas, have you implemented in MotoGP?
Jason Green ā“ Lead Artist: Weāve taken art and design crews to the different locations that make up the āMotoGPā calendar, following the 2001 season to some pretty far out places. When weāre there we take a few thousand hi-res photos with which we can accurately build our geometry and generate our textures. We also use a lot of photography to generate our micro/macro multipass texturing which is what gives the environment its raw, gritty and ultra realistic look.
The control mechanism is pretty unique, you control both bike and rider separately, that sounds weird but itās really intuitive after a couple of minutes play and a much more rewarding way of āfeelingā the handling of a racing bike.
TVG: When you decided to create a racing game what factors did you pinpoint as ones lacking in other racing games? Also do the specs of the PC play a part in the equation?
Shawn Hargreaves: Iām a huge fan of the Xbox - itās a really nice and well-designed bit of hardware. The PC can be just as good (and sometimes even better), but every PC is slightly different and some drivers can be very unreliable, so there are a lot more hassles in getting it to run well on the PC. It looks great once all these problems have been sorted out, but Xbox is a lot easier!
Jon: A lot of racing games on the market seem to be lacking in any significant depth. What I mean is, thereās often a shortage of interesting and different game modes and as a result people can become bored quite quickly. In MotoGP weāve got 5 different game modes which offer different types of gaming, with two significant styles of play; Arcade or GP Series.
The main focus is the GP series ā“ a simulation of the 2001 Championship series. In this game mode you get the opportunity to create your own rider, specifying the style and colour of their leathers, bike and helmet, before competing in a simulation of the 2001 MotoGP World Championship.
As you progress throughout the series, your rider also progresses in terms of skill and ability, through the use of an interactive ārider experienceā credit system.
More of a focus is placed upon individual Grand Prix, with full race weekend events (practice, qualifying and main race sessions) documentary style introductions and ārace highlightsā reward videos.
The arcade mode offers a dramatically different style of gameplay, with a simple checkpoint system governing the players progression throughout the championship.
This mode also features a comprehensive scoring system, where points are awarded for a variety of maneuvers, such as wheelies, endos, burnouts, clean sections, overtakes and time bonuses. These points can then be used to unlock extra bikes and riders, as well as some of the more advanced hidden features.
Itās also worth mentioning the multiplayer features ā“ players can compete in single race rounds or an entire championship, selecting either an arcade or championship scoring system. As well as the usual multiplayer features youād expect with a PC game (such as LAN and internet play) we also support up to 16 player system link options on the Xbox.
TVG: How hard is it to get the AI right and is it the racers or is it the bikes that they ride the real factor?
Shawn: AI was tricky. If the AI is too easy, people will quickly get bored with the game, so we wanted to make sure it could be competitive on the harder difficulty settings. But it isnāt easy to make AI anywhere near as good as a human being who has spent many hours practicing the game. We started out giving it a bit of an advantage by letting the AI players ride more powerful bikes, but this turned out to be annoying as you could too clearly see that the computer players had better acceleration and higher top speed than you did. So the AI ended up driving with the exact same physics as the human players, and Iām extremely proud of the fact that our final AI is able to cope with this, and still present a challenge even to the best players.
Jay: The races can be really āwheel to wheelā, lots of slipstreaming, cutting up and overtaking. No āon-railsā convoy of zombie pre-programmed competition; youāre in a race for the finish line with everyone else.
How do various bikes handle differently? Surely it is all down to the adeptness/skill of the player?
Shawn: Most of it is down to the skill of the player, but there are some differences between the bikes. It is easier to win the GP if you ride a Honda or Yamaha, but a good player would still stand a chance on a Paton or Pulse.
As well as the bikes being different, we have a system of rider experience points that gives each player different abilities in the areas of acceleration, top speed, braking, and cornering. These attributes actually make a lot more difference than the choice of bike, and we use them to make sure that if you choose to race as Rossi, you will be able to go faster and turn more tightly than if you choose one of the less expert riders. When you play the GP series mode, you get to create your own custom rider with your own name and choice of livery, and have to win experience points that you can distribute to any of these categories. You get some points for free when you first create a rider, and can earn more by doing well in races or by completing the training missions. So every rider ends up slightly different, and youāll have to do well through at least one whole season if you want to get a character as fast as Rossi.
TVG: How focused are you on realism and authenticity?
Rich: As mentioned before we sent people out to all the tracks included in the game to gather reference material on bikes, riders, and the tracks themselves, so everything you see is as authentic as we could manage.
The bikes in the real world sport are all different so consequently react in different ways depending on situation and conditions; we have attempted to build this into the handling. Although the bikes handling does vary from machine to machine the main difference is with the rider attribute points (cornering, braking, top speed and acceleration), we looked at the season as a whole and worked out how well each rider performed and based on this we allocated the rider attribute points. Input we have had from āreal bikersā has been very informative and Iām glad to say positive.
TVG: A quote in a THQ press release says, this is the meanest, fastest; game on two wheels, also there is a lot of innovative game play elements, plus it is fast. Explain in a little detail!
Shawn: All of the above. The screen update runs at 60 frames a second, because smooth animation is important to make a game feel fast. The bikes move quickly, and you need to react quickly if you want to make it around a tight corner in the middle of a pack of other riders, but we also added a load of effects to increase the sensation of speed. A full screen motion blur kicks in at very high speeds, and we also change the field of view of the camera to simulate the distortion that can happen to your vision. We basically just wanted to make it feel like you really are riding a bike at 200 miles an hour (a sensation which is missing from a lot of games), so we did everything we could think of to get this across to the player.
Jay: Yeah, like I said, itās really fast; youāll have to try it out for yourself to see. Most people using a fast bike on, say, the main straight in Mugello or Phillip Island bottle it before maxing the speed out.
To do well you need to slipstream the other bikes, just like in the real sport. Itās pretty dangerous ācos itās easy to run into the back of whoeverās giving you a ātowā. Games without slipstreaming seem pretty tame to me now.
TVG: Many racing games pour the focus on the actual vehicles, so what focus, time and resources have you placed on the actual racers/drivers?
Shawn: Riders are very important to a bike racing game, far more so than in a car game because the rider is out in plain view all the time, and controls the bike in a much more direct way than a car driver, throwing their weight around to fling it through corners rather than just manipulating a steering wheel. So we spent a lot of time on the animation of the rider models, and made moving the riderās weight a core part of the control system.
Rich: The riders in the real world sport of MotoGP are the stars; we reflected this in focusing the game on being able to build up your own rider throughout the Grand Prix. As the player progresses through the season he is awarded experience points that can be distributed to increase the riders overall performance, coupled with the training mode (where experience points are also awarded) the player can build a rider that is competitive on any bike.
TVG: With so many tracks around the world do climatic conditions have a ābigā effect and are they pretty random or will the player turn weather conditions on or off?
Jay: The tracks feel like theyāre set where theyāre set, thatās part of why we went to them. For example, the trees in Italy or Germany are very different from those in the Czech Republic or Spain, we donāt just have a few tree textures and one grass texture for the game, that seems to be what most games have and itās just lazy in these days of CD/DVD storage. All of our textures are level specific, generated from unique location photography.
Shawn: We have sunny days, cloudy days, and rainy days, but these are all different around the world, for instance a sunny day in Valencia (Spain) will be very bright with lots of heat-haze effects, while a sunny day in Donnington (England) will still have lots of clouds in the sky. In the quick race mode, time trials, and multiplayer modes you can choose your own weather condition, but in the GP series and Arcade championship modes it will be selected for you, using a random system that is weighted according to the area of the world, so it will be more likely to be rainy in England and probably sunny in Spain, but always with some chance of different unusual weather.
Rich: The bike handling in the wet is slightly different; the tracks will feel a little more slippery than normal dry weather handling. It is most noticeable accelerating away from the starting grid where the back wheel is likely to spin in the wet if care isnāt taken. Also cornering can be affected especially if the āpower slideā maneuver is used, with the bike being very likely to slide out from underneath the rider.
TVG: Have you gone the route of many Japanese developers in adding lots of secret elements that the player will find and unlock, and learn by trial and error?
Jay: This gameās loaded with unlockables, we canāt give them all away, itād ruin the surprise, but thereās one for your āJSRFā fans, one for your 80ās āAhaā fans, one for your old skool āardcore arcade shoot āem up fans, plus a whole stack more.
The game is aimed squarely at people who want an adrenalin fix, for people who are bored with slow racing games with a few brain dead competitors to ābeatā. Itās āarcadeyā, deep and the way forward for racing games.
Shawn: Oh yes :-) As well as all the obvious things like extra riders, mirrored and reversed tracks, a special super-hard difficulty mode, and the Sheridan Circuit (a made-up track which is used for the training mode, and which you can unlock the option to race on), there are a lot of silly cheat modes. We have a lot of stylised graphical effects (cartoon rendered, sketch mode rendered, and some more that you will have to find for yourselves), a really silly sound effects cheat, the option to race as one of the umbrella girls rather than a biker, and even an entire retro-style arcade mini-game waiting to be discovered!
TVG: Do bikes (even the riders) sustain damage and how does this affect the handling?
Shawn: The bikes collect scrapes and scratches if you crash them, but this does not affect the handling. We also have an engine heat simulation option which players can turn on if they like, which slows down the bike if the engine overheats, so you need to pace your speed and take more care to slipstream other players.
The problem with making damage affect the handling is that it tends to be mostly beginner players who crash a lot, so if being damaged makes the bikes less easy to control, that can be really off-putting for people who are already finding the game a bit of a challenge! It tends to be the really good players who would find it fun to deal with a damaged bike, but then, the really good players donāt crash very often. Although it is a nice sounding idea, making the damage affect the handling turned out to get in the way of balancing the game play, so we didnāt do that.
TVG: What camera views will be available? Surely to make it realistic there should only be the first person view? Is the camera moveable by the player or intelligent?
Shawn: First person camera is realistic, but a bit too intense for most casual gamers (I certainly canāt handle it!) so we give the player a choice. You can race in a cockpit view (where the camera moves to follow the riderās head as you lean around corners and shift your weight forwards or backwards), or you can choose between three different third person views, or if you are totally mad, you can even try to play it from a wheel-mounted camera!
TVG: The cameras are quite intelligent, shifting position according to your speed, angle of lean, and whether you are skidding or not, so as to give you the best possible view of the action.
Rich: The game has 3 main third person camera views from behind the player, a cockpit view and the wheel-mounted camera that, as Shawn says, is a little intense.
- Third Person 1: This view is relatively close to the rider at around head height and mimics the bikes movements so when the bike leans the camera angle smoothly rotates to a similar degree giving the player a good feel for the bike.
- Third Person 2: Same position as the previous camera but without the rotating movement.
- Third Person 3: This camera view is higher and further away from the bike and rider. This view can be especially useful to novice players as more of the track in front of the rider can be seen. It is easier to see and take corners or work your way through the pack. The player can flick between these views whilst racing if he so desires, also a very useful look behind camera so you can keep track of competitors closing in on your rider.
There will, of course, be pit stops to repair any damage and for refueling. When can these be accessed and how detailed and precise will they be for the player to understand and negotiate?
Jay: You can go down the pit lane, you can drive into the garages, but if you do you wonāt win the race. In the real sport the bikes carry enough fuel to make it to the end without refueling, if you stopped to refuel youād lose too much time to stay competitive, itās not F1.
TVG: Are the bikes (or racers) customizable and will tactics and understanding of them play a part in the game?
Jay: Yes, and thereās lots of unlockable goodies to get.
Shawn: Bike and rider can both be visually customised (choose a livery pattern, color combination, number, and initials that are shown on the back of your leathers). Once you start the game, riders are further customised by winning experience points that can be used to improve different attributes of the rider.
TVG: Sum up the experience in a sentence
jon: Ultimate Racing Technology.
Jay: Youāll make your controller all sweaty.
