Rob's Blog

I’ve always enjoyed realistic driving games that attempt to simulate the real world physics of car control as much as possible – as opposed to arcade driving games. Most of the reason is that they’re so much more challenging; the rest of the reason is that I can pretend that skills I’m learning in a racing sim would translate to real racing.

This isn’t quite true. In a real car you can feel the forces and the movement, wheras a simulator has to convey this feedback visually and aurally. The best ones have realistic sound that provide information about the engine, transmission and tyre adherence — a bit of a squeal and you’re close to the limits of traction — a cockpit rendered in 3D that allows the driver’s simulated head to move forward, back, left and right in reaction to the forces on the car, and force feedback that gives information about bumps in the road and the grip of the front wheels through a turn (this thanks to a force feedback wheel like my trusty Logitech MOMO Force). All this means that to become good at a driving sim you have to learn to read these signals rather than the ones you’d experience in a real car.

Having said this, what’s most important about a driving simulator is that it has as realistic a physics model as possible. Development teams go to great lengths to recreate the effects of the car’s suspension, aerodynamic surfaces and weight distribution; and the way the tyre pressures and temperatures change over time and the effects this has on grip. The better the physics, the more real world racing techniques can be applied to the game.

This works so well that there is a well known web site called GPL Foolishness that describes how to drive the ideal racing line, the importance of corner exit speed, and how to trail-brake. It was written for Grand Prix Legends — an older game with one of the best physics models ever, and still available from Sold Out Software (who have an appalling website; you’ll have to find it yourself under “sport”) — but the techniques can be applied to other simulators and real racing. Even books about racing techniques can help.

Currently my favourite racing sim is Live For Speed. It’s an online game developed independently by a British team who are releasing it on the web in stages. S1 has been out for a year and features several cars and tracks to race on. Best of all it’s very easy to find a server and join a race, and racing against real people is much more fun than against artifical intelligence. It’s good etiquette in online races to avoid crashing and taking out half of the field, so thankfully LFS lets you practice offline and has a credit system that keeps you out of the more powerful, harder to drive cars.

Another good one is NASCAR Racing 2003 Season from the now defunct Papyrus, the people who brought us Grand Prix Legends. There’s a lot more to driving around an oval than you might think, and it leads to some incredibly close, tense racing.

And there’s plenty to look forward to. GTR is a GT racing sim developed by SimBin, whose CEO is a GT racing driver himself. I’ve played the press demo (password GTR_Press_Demo) and it promises to be immense fun.

Live For Speed S2 is in testing, and features new cars and tracks, better graphics, and possibly some damage modelling for the first time.

Richard Burns Rally looks to be the first proper rally simulator, with full length courses and the most unbelievably detailed physics modelling ever. (“The engine model in Richard Burns Rally simulates all of the working parts of a four stroke internal engine and each individual combustion cycle.”) I’m particularly looking forward to this one. Unusually for a simulation, it’s already out on consoles, but the PC version promises to be even better.

More information about many more games, current and upcoming, can be found at Race Sim Central. In particular their forum section is not to be missed.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 20th, 2004 at 8:11 pm and is filed under Driving, Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.