SHIFT 2 UNLEASHED. Let's Talk About Physics

The narrative is told from the mouth of Rod Chong, so don't blame me for the direct speech

There is one activity that interests me greatly - pattern recognition, especially of trends and collective opinions. Certain skills in this activity allowed me to work a bit as a creative director and have served me well for many years.

One of the patterns I examined after the release of SHIFT1, was your point of view regarding the in-game physics. SHIFT1 definitely tried to satisfy both fans of arcade physics (fans of the old series Need For Speed), and sim racers. The feel of the game remained somewhere between these two types of racing games.

After I showed you the in-game AE86, I was very interested to read your feedback. It turned out that, while many of you were delighted by the material of my presentation, you wanted to know more about the physics and our approach to the game.

I am pleased to report that SHIFT2 is positioned more as a simulator. And I'm glad not only because of pride that we pushed the genre to a new level.

Now the positioning of the gameplay experience of SHIFT2 UNLEASHED is quite significantly different from those in Forza and GT. We set out to recreate the first-person view and the feeling of a person during an intense race, time trial and drift. We arrived at creating a completely new type of driving in the game: the helmet-cam view.

This creates a fairly strong sense of presence behind the wheel of a race car, say, your hot hatch that you've turned into a real machine for competing in the FIA GT1 class. Every tiny nuance was lovingly transferred from life into the game. We understood that driving a powerful car should not just be mathematical modeling of the situation several steps ahead. It should also be brutal and scary.

Let's just face the facts: motorsport is dangerous and "dirty". It is in this direction that we developed our ideas.

To make sure we did everything right (both the new physics and the helmet camera), we turned to experts. We didn't have to go far: the teams at Speedhunters and Need For Speed had their own racers who had experience in racing and drifting, so it was these racers that we decided to involve in testing our creation.

The guys at Slightly Mad Studios (hereinafter SMS) delved quite deeply as a whole team into researching the behavior of high-powered cars on the track. But to get a deeper match between the behavior of cars in the game and their behavior on the track, we tied them to some of the drivers from our team.

When the transition to the new technology happened, the physics of SHIFT1 became synonymous with the word "nothing". We took actual information about suspension geometry from the blueprints of various cars and transferred the suspension components into three-dimensional space. This is not some developer's vision of how a car should handle. Not at all. For example, if you drive a Porsche 911 in the game, then you are driving an exact physical copy of the car, reconstructed from blueprints and technical specifications. If you look not at the driving feel, then your gaze will immediately fall on the driving assist and handling settings of the car such as: road grip, tire slip angle and engine, gearbox settings, etc. So we gave ourselves a bit of room to maneuver in order to split the difficulty levels and game physics modes into several new directions.

SMS also added this screen, which displays current information about the forces acting on your car. This screen, among other things, shows tire temperature, lateral slip force and the direction of wheel grip on the road.

This screen displays the telemetric properties of the shock absorbers, which allows you to see what is happening with the suspension.

But, as I already said, our goal was to make the game not only as realistic as possible, but also to convey the feeling of driving powerful cars. I don't think that has been done for a long time. I'm serious. How many existing physics engines have made you feel fear, the same as if you were driving a real race car at the limit of its capabilities?

And the first driver to lay his hands on an early version of SHIFT2 UNLEASHED, was Vaughn Gittin JR. Some of you surely remember that we sent him to the UK last May to take part in a "Speedhunting trip" at Silverstone. We can't say whether this trip was a real goal for him to sit with the SMS team and test a completely reworked drift mode. What did we expect? We wanted to see if we could capture the essence of drifting. Drifting should be a fun, thrilling and slightly hooligan process. So we decided to start from scratch and focused attention in SHIFT2 on car setup and driving assists more than on another set of physical properties of car behavior. I am very pleased with the result, which took many months of work from SMS. They worked on it until they got that very, correct result.

I photographed him and Will Roegge the moment he arrived at the SMS office in London.

We wanted to look at JR's reaction and understand whether we were on the right path or not. He liked the direction we were working in, but he also had many suggestions, which we worked on and included in the game mode. In future articles I will let JR talk about this in more detail.

The next driver to test the game was Jamie Campbell Walter, one of the drivers of the Nissan GT-R Sumo Power. We set up a special session last August in London so that he could try out SHIFT2 UNLEASHED.

Since we had the licenses for FIA GT1 World Championship and GT3 European Serieswe wanted to make sure we had accurately recreated the speed and driving feel of cars in these classes. Was the target lap time right? Was the braking distance correct? Was there too much or too little downforce? And most importantly: had we captured the driving feel correctly?

Jamie was impressed with the overall feel of SHIFT2, especially the helmet view, but said we needed to increase downforce, as in his opinion the real GT-R Sumo Power feels more planted to the ground than its in-game counterpart. Jamie felt the car should turn in more aggressively.

He also noted that we needed to raise the gear shifter in the GT-R cockpit, because in the real car it sits higher.

He said we hadn't overdone the braking distance. He found himself braking at exactly the same points where he braked on the real track at Spa, and saw no difference.

We took his feedback on board and invited him back for a test a month later... this time he was more than happy with our progress.

Next up was one of the guys from our racing team who get far too biased when it comes to racing sims: Tommy Milner. What's interesting is that he and I got into racing sims starting with the old game from EA - Sport Car GT, and we've kept in touch ever since.

To start with, we updated his BMW to the latest 2010 configuration. A couple of calls to our colleagues at Rahal Letterman Racing got us the current graphics file with the livery scheme for his BMW, which we used on the new 3D model.

Then we invited him in October for a closed-door play session at Formula D Irwindale.

Tommy gave us a lot of advice that day. First, he said we needed to redo the headlight lighting in the new night mode. To drive the Nurburgring Nordeschleife at night you need more powerful lighting. He noted that the trees, crash barriers and signs were lit very realistically, but the road itself wasn't lit enough. It was simply impossible to see where you were going in the pitch-black darkness of the night Nurburgring, lit by street lamps.

Second, he liked the suspension on the BMW and felt the car's setup matched the characteristics of his real race car quite closely. He felt the car swayed and spun too much, which shouldn't happen in a high-end GT2 race car.

Later we found out that the suspension of high-end race cars in SHIFT2 needed work. Tommy helped us with that.

Tommy really is a great driver in the game, but Darren McNamara can compete with Tommy at his own game.

Darren was pleasantly surprised by the in-game D-Mac86, which was recreated exactly in SHIFT2.

Darren was quite interested to try the new drift mode... he also gave us a couple of tips on the amount of lateral grip in the tire models during very fast wheelspin in a long slide, which we discussed later with SMS.

Rado showed up too, but rather suddenly...

... and was completely blown away by the in-game copy of his all-wheel-drive Scion. It's one of the wildest and fastest cars in SHIFT2, and pretty scary to drive, let me tell you! Driving this monster on the Nordschleife or Bathurst is just too scary :> (the smiley was shamelessly copied from the original article, so there! ^__^ - translator's note)

The whole Twins Turbo team are pretty hardcore gamers too... They were practically itching to try the game. (well, I didn't have the imagination here, translated as is - translator's note)

Their Viper was added to SHIFT2 UNLEASHED rather late, but we worked with Twins Turbo long enough to make this car and get it to drive the way it should. I'll tell you about that process later...

Of all the drivers we worked with on SHIFT2 UNLEASHED, Edward Sandstrom had the biggest influence on the game. He worked at the EA DICE Studio in Stockholm for about three months last winter and personally tuned the characteristics of every car. He also wanted the high-end GT cars to turn in more aggressively and focused on making them more alive, so that you could control the car's pitch and yaw angle with the throttle on corner exit.

Of course we have to mention Patrick Soderlund, who spent 2010 not only behind the wheel of the Team NFS Schubert BMW Z4 GT3, but also overseeing all the racing projects at EA. The first game released under his leadership was NFS Hot Pursuit, and SHIFT2 UNLEASHED will be the second.

I think Patrick considers SHIFT2 a bit of a special project for him, which is why he spends time testing all the game physics settings. In particular, he was interested in comparing his real driving experience in the Z4 GT3 with the in-game experience.

The last big test of the game was at SEMA in November. We rented a private room above the exhibition hall and showed the game to select journalists and drivers on a D-Box rig.

By the way, notice that Tommy prefers to drive in socks. Apparently sneakers dull the sensitivity of the pedals too much.

Tommy is the fastest sim racer I've ever seen in my life. It's hard to believe he shows off his racing skill for all to see.

We also let Fredric Aasbo and Matt Powers try the game. Interestingly, Fredric saw no difficulty in drifting using a controller AND a manual transmission. More tests conducted by these people and some other guests revealed that the mode needed a couple more changes. Personally, I think drifting now feels quite realistic. You can still feel the tires gripping the track, and you can also choose driving assists based on your sim racing skills.

Personally I love all these D-Box rigs. With their bunch of motion settings, vibrations and built-in sound environment, it's the best way to immerse yourself in SHIFT2 UNLEASHED... I'm just shaking with adrenaline when I sit in one of those seats.

Of course, this new focus on deep, immersive realism would not have been possible without the superhuman efforts of the team Slightly Mad Studios. Once they were given the freedom and the opportunity to unlock the full potential of their physics engine in a game built on pure realism, they immediately set to work on new visual effects and a completely new level of detail in car tuning. If a part or parameter can be adjusted on a real car, then it can be adjusted in the game. And the better the part you install on your car, the more adjustments you can make.

So, to answer your questions: YES, the feel of playing SHIFT2 UNLEASHED really is very realistic, and the physics engine has improved and evolved significantly.

Source

Sanya Mostovoy, next time I'll dump this whole miracle on you. Translating such huge walls of text is too tiring...

Translation: Kyon