From Automobile, September, 1999
Los Angeles- You know those annoying banners that materialize whenever you connect to the Internet? Before too long, you may start seeing ones that blare: "Welcome Race Fans!" And don't be surprised if a few virtual beer cans - the inflatable six-foot-tall variety - are standing next to them.
Though traditionalists will no doubt find this impossible to believe (or stomach), the Internet is fast becoming the world's biggest racing venue. Not just for racing news or racing chat rooms or even racing memorabilia. No, for racing. Real racing. Racing that involves testosterone-crazed drivers competing head to head for pride, championships, and, in some cases, cash dollars. Lots of them.
Earlier this year, at the end of its inaugural season, the PC-based NASCAR Racing Online Series (NROS) - yes, it carries the imprimatur of America's most popular sanctioning body - awarded no less than $30,000 in prize money. And this is just the beginning of a trend that promises to see online racing develop into a sport in its own right. "We're not talking about arcade games. We're talking about simulations that demand the same skills required by real racing but aren't as taxing physically or financially," says Alison Hine, a former real-life racer who helped create a user-based online racing network. "We have to stop thinking of online racing as a game and start thinking of it as a sport - real racing in simulated cars on simulated tracks."
At peak hours, about 500 would-be Winston Cup drivers from all over the country compete in dozens of NROS races. Meanwhile, on the Virtual Racers' Online Connection (VROC), drivers bring as much international flavor to the racing as the Grand Prix they're simulating. A recent Formula 1 event at Zandvoort drew entries from England, Austria, Finland, Australia, and both coasts of the United States.
Already, a rabid subculture has emerged on the Net, where hundreds of sites devoted to racing sims have popped up over the past five years. Here, you can find online magazines, compendiums of lap records, detailed setup recommendations, elaborate disquisitions about driving technique and vehicle dynamics, and utilities that allow hackers to customize games, as well as scads of slick, easily downloadable files that enable gainers to transform, say, mid-Nineties Indy cars into contemporary IRL machines or permit a Lotus 49, for example, to run on the bullring at Hickory.
But all of this, to a degree, is just window dressing. The foundation of the sport of online racing, if sport it is to be, is the soft- ware that creates the virtual environment. And as recently as five years ago, there weren't any games that simulated the racing world with enough fidelity to enthrall anybody but hard-core (read, racing-crazed) gainers. That's all changed with the latest crop of titles - PC games such as the 1967 F1 simulation Grand Prix Legends, the most ambitious racing sim ever produced; NASCAR Racing, the most popular racing game around; Sports Car GT, which brings big time sports car racing to virtual life; Monaco Grand Prix, the best contemporary F1 game on the market; and Grand Prix 2, a dated classic simulating the 1994 Fl season.
Granted, even in these games, the vehicle dynamics are relatively crude (although they're miles ahead of arcade and console-based games). But coupled with spectacular graphics and remarkably effective sound, these sims manage to create an experience that is, if not a flawless substitute for real racing, then at least a reasonable facsimile thereof .
There's just one problem: The games were designed to pit users primarily against computer-generated opponents operating according to artificial intelligence (AI) programs, which, besides being predictable, generally aren't as good as human drivers. The obvious solution was to play via modem. Randy Magruder, a software engineer who writes a sim racing column on the Digital Sportspage, experienced a defining moment while modem-racing with a friend. Their two Indy cars were evenly matched at Portland, and Magruder was able to get by only after "rattling his [friend's] cage" by getting right up on his gearbox. "That was the first time I realized how cool online racing could be," he says. "I don't want to say there's no going back [to running against AI], but you'll never feel the same sense of pressure and reward as you do racing against real people."
Unfortunately, modern play came with one glaring deficiency: Only two people could play at one time. So, in 1996, Papyrus Design Group, developer of NASCAR Racing, created the "Hawaii" network with a powerful host computer, or server, near Boston equipped with special modems that allowed up to twenty gainers to race on the track at the same time. The system worked so well that virtual racers started racking up astronomical long-distance phone bills. Under the circumstances, running racing sims on the Internet was a no-brainer. And while some vexing technical issues remain [see sidebar], Marc Nelson, a systems analyst who runs SimRacing Online, says: "Online play is definitely the wave of the future. Eventually, I think that everything will be written to run online."
At the moment, the three biggest online gaining sites - the Internet Gaming Zone, mplayer.com, and Heat - boast a total of more than seven million users. Most of the activity has been in first-person-shooter games, Quake 2 being the most popular, or at the other end of the spectrum with "lite" entertainment such as Monopoly. Of the serious racing sims, only NASCAR Racing has found a volume audience so far.
Although NASCAR Racing can be played on Heat, NROS runs exclusively on the Total Entertainment Network (TEN), which provides an unrivaled level of technical support in return for fees starting at $9.95 a month. As well as running its own divisions, NROS also serves as the framework for pickup races and dozens of user-run leagues operating under their own rules.
Dave Trager, a former motocrosser who runs his own carpet-cleaning business, races in a 110-member league that follows the Winston Cup schedule, with fixed setup races on Sunday nights and open setup races on Monday nights. Events begin in a chat room with a drivers meeting, continue with a practice session, qualifying, a warmup (in case the track temperature has changed), and conclude with half-distance races involving pace laps, yellow flags, pit stops, and just about everything else short of commentary from Benny Parsons. "Patience is probably the number one point to remember in long races," says Tragar, who finished third in NROS's Pro finale earlier this year. "A lot of guys can run fast for twenty or thirty laps, but unless you save the tires, you're not going to be there in the end."
Grand Prix Legends (GPL) has an even more fanatical following than NASCAR Racing. "I use the headphones and crank the volume so high that, sometimes, my ears are ringing afterward," says GPL devotee David Hiebert, a one-time off-road racer whose unique name is crankshaft. "When I'm in a league race, my girlfriend knows better than to say a word. She just goes in the other room and watches TV." GPL:s rarefied subject matter and the diabolical difficulty of controlling the cars have kept it off the commercial online gaming sites. At the moment, in fact, it can be played only over VROC, a site developed largely by GPL beta tester Alison Hine to enable the computer of one of the racers to host an online race.
Roughly 1000 people have raced on VROC, Hine says, with perhaps 250 running regularly. "It's addicting. Very addicting," says Michael E. Carver, a library technician who wrote the Frequently Asked Questions document for rec.autos.simulators, the premier racing sim Usenet group on the Net, "Basically, I have become a racing simulation junkie."
Operations Manager Don Walters says a recent NASCAR Racing Online Series survey showed that drivers spent an average of twelve hours racing online per week. Carver admits to more than twenty. The Total Entertainment Network has one guy who has averaged eight hours a day, seven days a week, for the past fourteen months. "He has over 100,000 laps on TEN right now," Walters says. Can NROS Anonymous be far away?
Nevertheless, online racing isn't just for computer geeks and shut-ins. As Hine puts it, "If I told you that, for $1500, you could drive a Formula 1 car against other human beings on some of the most beautiful racetracks that ever existed, and that you could do it any time you wanted, without any risk or maintenance costs, why wouldn't you want to do it?"
Sitting on the grid at Atlanta Motor Speedway, I knew my Winston Cup car was nothing more than an artful construct of ones and zeros. So why was my heart pounding? Why were my lips dry? Why did this feel like the prelude to a race - not a virtual one but the real article? The green flag waved, and I quickly discovered how online racing differs from racing against a computer: I was immediately rear-ended. Next, I was punted into the wall. Then, while I was trying to limp back to the pits, I was rammed yet again and knocked into submission.
Later, I discovered that the so-called zone where I was racing, an area reserved for free NROS play, was populated largely by novices and notorious for its wreck-fests. As I progressed to more advanced levels, the racing grew cleaner. In league events, I'm told, wrecks are rarer still.
My brief NROS experience spotlights some remarkable similarities between real racing and its online doppelgiinger. At the same time, I also found some telling differences. First, frustrating as it is to crash out of an online race, it's not nearly as disheartening as crashing a real race car, with all the attendant embarrassment, cost, and possible injury. Also, online racers never encounter the visceral sort of fear that's an integral part of real racing.
On a philosophical plane, online racing offers none of the car-guy pleasures and little of the camaraderie of real racing, a sport that demands vast outlays of labor for brief stretches of track time. This skewed effort-versus-reward ratio is hard to justify unless you enjoy working on cars and hanging around racetracks. Online racing scratches a considerably different itch.
But the biggest weakness of sim racing is the inability of a computer to simulate the feel of a car. And in most race cars, tire slip angles are too small to provide any visual cue that something's amiss until long after the seat of the pants has identified the problem. This leaves game developers the option of either simulating too much cornering stability (the Grand Prix II paradigm) or too much instability (the GPL model).
GPL is almost universally lauded as the first game with a physics engine that accurately models car performance. Actually, I think the cars handle more like sprint cars on dirt than Grand Prix machines circa 1967. Granted, driving at the limit is supposed to be a difficult proposition, but without hours of seat time, it's virtually impossible to run a GPL car without crashing at any speed above a crawl.
But if GPL falls short in terms of true realism, it's far more realistic than its competitors in the sense that it requires more of its drivers. Anyone who is familiar with racing sims and high-performance driving technique will be able to turn decent lap times in most games after a few hours. GPL demands days, if not weeks, in front of the computer. And maybe that's the way it ought to be.
-PL
In online racing, speed comes in three forms-speed on the track, speed over the Internet, and the speed of your computer. When you race online, so-called packets of information are sent from your computer to a central server, which plots the positions of all the cars on the track and transmits this information back to your computer, The duration of this trip is known as latency. High latency means big problems.
Say your latency is 500 milliseconds. Most games contain a program that predicts what cars will do when the necessary packets of information arrive late. But these programs are imperfect and a lot can happen in half a second when cm are moving at 200 mph, When latency exceeds a certain point - it varies from game to game - a car "warps," meaning that it moves instantaneously from one position to another. When cars are running close together, warping cm lead to giant crashes. Excessive latency can even cause cars to wink out altogether.
Although other factors come into play, latency is principally a function of the size of the ,information "pipeline" from your computer to the Internet. The most cormmon, but slowest, connection is an analog modem, Alternatives, in ascending order of speed, are ISDN, ADSL, and cable modems. But each carries technical limitations. And, naturally, more sophisticated systems cost more money.
The quality of your online racing experience also depends on the speed of your computer, For example, Grand Prix Legends will run - barely - on a 166MHz Pentium machine with 32MB of RAM, but 266MHz and 64MB are preferred, and 450MHz and 128MB is the way to go. Also plan to buy an aftermarket sound card and a 3D accelerator. For a fully optioned system, prices should range from $1500 to $2000.
-PL