February, 1998: It's been a long time. Too long, really. Not since the destruction of my beloved aerobatic airplane have I shouted for joy at the sheer ecstasy of creating moving paintings in space with a living, breathing, feral mechanical partner, dancing along that elusive magical dangerous twilight zone at the edge of control.
Tonight I shouted for joy, laughed with delirious delight, and sat stunned with the enormity of the accomplishment of the people who made this incredible experience possible.
It started when I turned up the volume.
Well, no. I suppose it started back in early '95 when I bought my first copy of IndyCar Racing. It gathered momentum over the last two years as I became increasingly involved with racing sims. Things really started happening when I went public with my opinions about a disappointing new release late last year.
It all came to a climax two days ago when I visited Papyrus, met some of the key developers, and came away with a prized early beta copy of Grand Prix Legends to evaluate. The last two days, I've been eagerly putting in a small fraction of the many hours it takes to become skilled driving such a demanding vehicle as a 1967 Brabham-Repco Grand Prix car.
Tonight on an impulse I moved my subwoofer into a corner to amplify the bass undertones in the Repco V-8's engine note, and...
Then I turned up the volume.
The developers call it "an immersive sim racing experience." I look at these dry words on the screen and wonder how such a normally, er, voluble person as myself can be at a loss for words to describe the feelings and sensations I have experienced at the wheel of this magnificent creation.
GPL's menus are gorgeous, as warm and inviting as F1RS' menus are bleak and cold. Though the menus are incomplete at this time, enough is present to make it obvious that the menus are as well-organized and gracefully functional as F1RS' are awkward, scattered, and cumbersome.
So far I have been a bit disappointed at some aspects of GPL's graphics. Although the graphics are very good, the visual atmosphere falls short of the gorgeous, sun-drenched landscapes of F1RS. F1RS raised the bar for graphical presentation in racing sims, perhaps higher than anyone outside of Ubi Soft might have imagined.
In its current state, many of GPL's colors seem to me too dark, and there seems to be less detail in the surrounding objects than I've become accustomed to. The lack of shadows except below the cars is quite disappointing, and it appears that time constraints will preclude their inclusion. Blocky, artificial-looking driver's arms dominate the lower part of the screen in the in-cockpit view, and when shifting, the driver's hand gets in the way of viewing the gearshift knob, whose position is the only visible indication of which gear the car is in.
On the other hand, the Brabham cockpit appears to be very realistically depicted, and each cockpit will be modeled after the real car. The exterior of the cars are each quite different, too; the Brabham has exhaust pipes at the top, and a rounded Brabham-style radiator inlet, while the Lotus 49's shown in the Kaemmer/Sentell video have exhaust pipes at the bottom, which is correct, and the distinctive Lotus 49-style radiator inlet. Suspension movements are exquisitely modeled; from inside the car, you can see the front A-arms working over the bumps, and from the outside, the car squats under acceleration, dives under braking, leans, and the wheels, tires, and suspension bits all follow their proper paths.
In a number of ways GPL's graphics are excellent. Mirror content is spectacular. The trees are transparent between their branches, and the wheels and tires are much more nicely drawn than those of F1RS. However, the track textures fall short of the lovely track textures drawn by Snowdog for The Sim Project's ICR2/CART Racing 3D track kits, and in some places the grass seems too monochromatic, the hills too bland. Other textures, such as the sand dunes at Zandvoort, are quite good.
The track models represent an enormous amount of effort; for example, Spa is 14 kilometers long, with fences, trees, houses, power lines, walls, spectators, and other stuff lining the entire distance.
None of the tracks are yet complete, and so far only the Rendition RRedline display engine is working. A 3Dfx implementation is nearing completion. I suspect that my impressions of the graphics could change substantially in the days to come.
I have read about driving along public roads in Belgium at 180 mph many times, racing right by houses with nothing more than a wire fence to keep the cars from mowing down spectators or winding up in someone's parlor. But actually driving the course at Spa in GPL is a sobering experience. It gave me an unprecedented appreciation of the courage - or foolhardiness - of the Grand Prix drivers of that era.
Eau Rouge is a particularly frightening corner. Unlike the 1996 version modeled in F1RS, which is bounded by nice, wide, friendly gravel traps, the 1967 version is bordered on one side by a stone wall and the other by a low Armco barrier - both right at the edge of the very narrow track! Driving these tiny cars, without fuel cells and with a roll bar that doesn't reach the top of your helmet, you realize immediately what a mistake here would mean.
Driving at Mexico, with spectators standing completely unprotected only a few feet from the outside of corners, is perhaps even more sobering. It seems a miracle now that more people were not killed in those days.
According to the developers, GP Legends was designed from the ground up as a multiplayer sim. There are two major components: the client and the server. The server handles the scoring, runs the AI cars, and distributes player car position information to the client machines. The client handles the realtime activity (i.e. the physics modeling) and other chores such as the graphical display, sounds, and user interface. In single-player mode, these components perform these same roles; the client simply connects to the server on its own machine.
The bottom line is that multiplayer racing should be the best we've seen yet. The developers are well aware of the problems with warping occurring from late or lost packets on the Internet, and have unique experience in dealing with these problems from implementing NROS. Some new innovations, like having a remote player's car follow the AI line when a packet is late, should improve things even more. The multiplayer action I saw on Papyrus' LAN looked very smooth, with none of the "vibrating" and warping I've seen with F1RS, even on a LAN.
After disappointment with problems in F1RS' multiplayer implementation, I'm very much looking forward to doing more testing of this aspect of GPL.
GPL's vehicle dynamics engine has been four years in development. All Papyrus sims in the foreseeable future will use adaptations of this core component. It's difficult to exaggerate the advances this implementation makes over previous racing sim implementations. It has roughly 18 degrees of freedom. Wheels, suspension components, and driveline components are all modeled.
For example, if you sit with the car in neutral, not moving, and blip the throttle, the rotational inertia of the internal engine parts causes the chassis to rotate slightly around its longitudinal axis. When the clutch is depressed and the gearbox is in neutral, the engine revs noticeably more quickly than when the clutch is out, due to the inertia of the transmission input shaft.
Gyroscopic forces from the wheels and tires are modeled, and contact between the sidewalls of the tires and objects such as fences and other cars is also modeled. It's possible to launch the car through oblique contact with a wall or another car's sidewall.
Of course, suspension movement is modeled; the car lurches and lunges over bumps and in response to control inputs from the driver. Great attention has been paid to accurately modeling tire behavior at different slip angles.
The whole physics engine runs at 288 hertz; this compares with the physics engine in ICR2, which ran at less than 40 hertz. It turns out that this high cycle rate is necessary in such a complex model to avoid strange oscillatory behavior, and the physics implementation was refined until it was able to run at a speed which avoided these oscillations.
As you might imagine, the development of the physics implementation required an immense amount of work.
The results are glorious.
At first, the car is very difficult to drive. Well, maybe I shouldn't say "at first". With 450 horsepower, a weight of about 1200 pounds, squishy suspension, and tires with less grip than modern street tires, a 1967 Grand Prix car is never going to be easy to drive. It is going to take a lot of practice to develop the skills to drive these cars well.
To the beginning driver, the car seems possessed of a life of its own, leaping and squirming around with every bump and every tiny movement of the controls. My first laps were at Monza, and I spun the car on the straight at well over 100 mph the first time I went through the kink before the first Lesmo. I didn't realize it, but full throttle at that speed was causing wheelspin, and when I tried to deviate from a straight line, with the grip at the rear consumed by wheelspin, the car simply went around!
Braking distances are incomprehensibly long. I'm used to simulations of cars with massive downforce, in which you drive up to the corner and about 300 feet before you get to it you stomp on the brakes and just go around. It seems I have to start braking halfway down the straight to have any chance of making a slow corner in GPL's spindly Brabham; sometimes I must start braking before I can even see the corner!
Any twitch of the wheel sends the car shooting off in what seems like random directions. A touch of the brakes when the steering wheel is anything but perfectly straight, or the car is even a tiny bit out of shape, and the car loops instantly.
I begin to wonder if I can ever learn to drive this thing!
But I persist, and gradually, after a lot of backwards trips through the grass and huge tumbling crashes off the walls, I begin to make sense of what the car needs to make it happy. Smooth and gentle are the watchwords here. As I learn to treat it the way it wants to be treated, the car begins to reward my patience. Deliciously.
When the car nears the limit, it is quite steerable with the throttle, but very tiny movements suffice. Lift out of the throttle completely and the car will swap ends in an instant. Lift ever so slightly, and the nose will tuck and your arc will sharpen, and in a moment you'll be able to squeeze in a bit more power to drift right out to the edge of the track at the exit point, feeling just like Jimmy Clark...
Ahh, here it is now. I am getting carried away. This is when I turned up the volume.
When I'd gotten skilled enough that I could make it around Zandvoort for an entire lap without spinning or crashing, and I could hold the car in a long glorious four-wheel drift through the last corner onto the main straight, engine roaring, tires squealing, chassis jiggling... and then haul the car down for the twisty bits, keeping the wheels just this side of locking under braking, bringing the tail around with the throttle out of the slow turns, starting to fling it hard over the humps and down through the little valleys between the dunes...
...and then with the thunder of the engine shaking the floor, feeling the vibrations through the steering wheel, the tires shrieking in my ears...I am no longer driving a simulation. It is 1967, and I am driving the very best race car that technology can build, at the limit, feeling the ecstasy of playing a wild beast of steel and aluminum and rubber like a fine instrument, licking delicately at that delicious murderous treat that lives at the edges of the limits of control.
Now I understand something about Jim Clark, Graham Hill, Dan Gurney and the others that never occurred to me before. Yes, they were brilliant drivers, artists with monstrous 400 hp mechanical paintbrushes. I knew that. But they were also gluttons for sensuality, repeatedly experiencing an intoxicating blend of visual, aural, tactile, and kinesthetic sensations available to only a very few mortals on this earth - until this coming summer.
Then we join them.
Papyrus is a small company, and it must work within certain economic realities. To survive, the company must issue profitable titles on a regular basis. For this reason, like many other racing sims, GP Legends will never be truly "finished". Much work has been done, and much remains.
The passion of the developers for their remarkable creation is unmistakable. To achieve all that they would wish would take many more years. Faced with the stark choice of cutting proposed features which they would love to get into this sim, or significantly slipping the product release date, they have already begun to omit such effects as changeable weather (ie rain) and the aforementioned shadows in the landscape. There will be other sacrifices.
Licensing difficulties have ruled out certain tracks, though vigorous licensing negotiations continue with regard to others. Every car, every engine, every driver, every advertisement, every track in the game must be licensed, and some owners of rights simply will not negotiate, while others refuse to be realistic about the profit potential of a niche product like a 1960's racing sim.
The finished product will not have everything that you or I or the developers would like it to have. But do not be dismayed.
The work-in-progress is already magnificant.