thanks mekanaizer again for your info...
ı have find an interview with the producer of the game,Mark Cale
FEBruary 25,08....
IGN: Give us a little background on your involvement with the real life Ferrari Challenge.
Mark Cale: Well, I used to race cars about seven years ago, but I've had a passion for Ferraris ever since I was about eight years old. In fact, the reason why System 3 was set up was with one goal, and that was to get enough money to get a Ferrari. So it's just been something that I've been passionate about since I was a child. So getting on to where we are now
IGN: You've really come full circle.
Mark Cale: Exactly. I've been trying to create this product from a view of someone that's been a complete devotee for most of my life. It's a bit like a football team, you know, you don't change your football team, and I was supporting Ferrari when they weren't winning world championships. It took them 21 years to win a world championship from when Jackie Ickx last won it for them, which was just a few years after Niki Lauda. So really, the whole Schumacher years everyone thinks of Ferrari's dominance and everything like that it wasn't actually like that. There was a long time when Ferrari were way down the back of the grid
[but] you always support your team.
IGN: Ferrari's always had a very romantic, stylish image though right?
Mark Cale: Absolutely. They're the most successful road racing team ever in history, and it's an iconic brand
so when there was because I know a lot of people very closely in the factory - an opportunity to actually do an official videogame of the race series, Ferrari Challenge, and follow on from what SEGA had done, of course for us it was a great opportunity. It was something I was deeply motivated to do myself as a personal milestone in my life, and we've tried to put a lot more into this product than what people would have normally done. I think you can see the big differences between what we've done with Ferrari Challenge and what SEGA had initially done. I mean, SEGA's 355 Challenge game was a real milestone race game when it came out in the arcades, but the first thing that we learnt was that people either loved it or hated it, and it was too sim-based.
IGN: So are you hoping that Ferrari Challenge will scale all the way from the hardcore sim nuts through to arcade fans?
Mark Cale: Yeah exactly. That's why we've got different levels of traction control, stability control, ABS even on some of the old cars we artificially put in traction control to help people, but of course, it's not an arcade game because it would be unfair to say it is. I wanted to try and balance it in the middle between arcade and sim. We feel we've created the definitive arcade-sim. So if you want the ultimate sim you have Gran Turismo. If you want something that's very arcadey, and that's thrashing cars around and not really caring, you've got things like Burnout Paradise... we wanted to position ourselves somewhere between the two.
IGN: So how closely did you look at Forza 2 and Project Gotham and some of the other games that straddle that line between sim and arcade?
Mark Cale: This is the Forza-type product for the PS3, and we've looked very closely at Forza 2 and what its failings were. And I think really, a fair comparison for us is for you to actually boot up Forza 2, put it on the 360, boot up Ferrari Challenge [on PS3], and it's immediately obvious, the differences between Forza and Ferrari Challenge. For one, I believe we've created something that's far more of a fun experience
I play videogames because I want to have fun. And I think that's the biggest difference, because with Forza 2, unless you were absolutely on the right line that they'd set out, you could never get anywhere. Also, it was far too twitchy in terms of the handling. The handling on Forza 2 I think was appalling. Like I said, you drive Ferrari Challenge and you drive a Ferrari in Forza 2 and it's immediate, the difference. Ours is a lot more friendly etcetera etcetera. You know, just a slight twitch and it's left, right, left y'know, so you're snaking all the way down even on a straight track, which is not realistic. A car doesn't do that in real life
if you play Forza 2 with a steering wheel it's a much better experience, but you can't play it with a joystick. Why is that? Because you've got to buy the Forza steering wheel which is another 60 quid or whatever. But hey, I'm just a cynic here, yeah, so from a gamer's point of view I think that's wrong because if I buy a game that's supposed to work with a controller bloody make it work with a controller! So that was the first thing that we made sure we had correct in Ferrari Challenge.
Now, to actually get that right, I didn't just want to put my passion into it and obviously what people and test drivers at Ferrari thought, we actually got Bruno Senna, Ayrton Senna's nephew in, who's a big gaming nut and poised to enter F1 next season. He became involved and did a lot of the set-up for all the different cars, so we had an accurate feel, so the car actually does what it would do in real life in that situation at that speed.
IGN: So what was involved? How technical was that process?
Mark Cale: Very technical, because what we've done is we've actually built in cameras into the car, and obviously we have mapping data anyway, so you can see where your fastest laps are, what you're doing, what your lap times are, what gear you're in at what part of the circuit, and the position on the circuit, so when we went to the different circuits we had all that data from the 430 Challenge car
the whole process of how to drive a challenge car he knows intimately. The process then started off all right, well let's go round in other cars, see what it should feel like in some motor cars or some race cars. So you've got things there from an FSX right the way down to 250 GTOs and 250 Testarossas from the early 60s and the late 50s. So there's a wide variety of cars you're actually unlocking in the game as well. The point is that we wanted the user to try and experience how it feels to drive a real car on a track without forgetting that arcade feel. That's where the synergy between Senna and myself came in there was a complete balance between sim and arcade.
IGN: Coming back to Forza 2 those guys had some pretty hardcore engineers on staff to authentically recreate the underlying mechanics and physics of racing. How far into those kinds of nuts and bolts did you go to build your engine and technology?
Mark Cale: We've got everything in there. In terms of the way the engine works is that each tyre has a level of grip, and there's a centrifugal force down onto that tyre, so if you put the weight in of a car, and you've got the basic set-up with how stiff the suspension is, the physics engine actually caters for what the car should feel like on the track, so it's extremely sophisticated as a piece of engineering. This is why we chose Eutechnyx
the nice thing about Eutechnyx is they've been building racing games for over 20 years
they're one of the very few independent race team developers left out there, but they've actually got fantastic technology. Where they've slacked in the past if I do have a criticism about Eutechnyx, is where they've worked with other publishers, it's more about the release date and getting the game done within a time frame and getting things done quickly as opposed to fine tuning something and making something into a fantastic racing experience.
IGN: How long has the team been working on this?
Mark Cale: 18 months
there's over 200 people working on it. We're talking about 150 artists artists in the UK, artists in China, artists in Hong Kong. Then we've got 60 game testers in India on this full time. It's really big.
IGN: Tell me a little about the AI technology you're using in the game.
Mark Cale: Each car has its own brain, its own individual driver, and it reacts in certain ways. You start bashing a particular car, that car is always a lot more aggressive to you than another car. They make mistakes. They out-brake themselves, they go off the track. They're not splined. Most games especially Gran Turismo
all the cars are splined, they all go round perfectly. Unless you're absolutely perfect, you're not going to get anywhere. What they do is they vary how perfect the spline engine is going to be
with our experience it's more realistic in that each car's an individual entity and it does make mistakes, and it does also do perfect racing. Every car is battling each other and banging each other off the track. You've got more of the bump and grind experience
I'm just looking, as a gamer, for what I want to play. I mean, there's no point, if I go off the track, if all the other cars are so bloody good that I've got to reset the machine and start again.
IGN: In terms of the development process, you've had a long relationship with Ferrari how has the company been to deal with in terms of licensing, and in terms of what you can and can't do with its brand? I imagine that it would be very protective.
Mark Cale: Fantastic. With an iconic brand there's obviously the dos and the don'ts. The don'ts are anyone trying to
sell their business on the back of the Ferrari brand, which I can understand. To be quite honest, because we've been so close with the guys in the factory, they've done their very level best to try and help in every way, and have made it very clear the things we can and can't do. One of the things that is a real milestone is that when we first started the project, the whole idea of spectacular crashes and everything else, realistically simulating what would happen to a car in real life is a first for a motor car company. If you look at Gran Turismo and everything else, there's no crash damage in there.
IGN: How difficult was it to convince them to allow that?
Mark Cale: That was probably the biggest task, because a lot of people internally understood what I meant, and I said look at the end of the day we've got a credit system so you don't just go around bashing up a car just because it's cool
IGN: You get penalised in terms of credits right?
Mark Cale: Right. That's a good example of our economy system.
IGN: In terms of the car modelling did Ferrari actually have 3D models of their cars from, say, the last 20 years that you could use, or anything like that?
Mark Cale: No, what Ferrari gave us was all of their CAD drawings for some of the later cars, but the earlier cars we built them ourselves from scratch, from photographs, getting cars into a studio, 3D modelling real cars. That's one thing that they complemented us on, when we went back to their designers and were sitting down going through the models, that the actual models we've built have been the most realistic shaped models that they've come across yet from anyone in the industry. It's been a real tribute to the development team.
IGN: You guys have detailed everything right down to the stitching on the dashboard and
Mark Cale: Oh yeah, absolutely. The stitching, the LED rev counters on some of the new cars like the 599 or the FSX. Everything, absolutely everything.
IGN: So in terms of modelling the courses what information did you use for recreating those. Did you go out and take photos primarily, or
Mark Cale: Yup. I think we were up to for cars and courses and everything else I think we were up to over eight million photographs.
IGN: Really? That's just ridiculous!
Mark Cale: (laughs) I know, but you need everything. Have a look at Hockenheim, or have a look at Silverstone in our game and Silverstone in Forza 2. Just look at the background detail. Have a look at the background detail in Gran Turismo. Gran Turismo's got fantastic rendered cars, and I'm not going to take that away from them their cars look lovely, absolutely lovely, but go and have a look at their backgrounds. It's like playing Pro Evo with cardboard cut-outs everywhere and really poor PSone-type textures on the side of the tracks. There has to be a compromise. You cannot have fantastic graphics just in one area and
[not] everywhere else.
We've gone for an overall experience. Forza 2 I don't think comes close to our game, or Gran Turismo
what we decided in terms of our graphics was we didn't want cardboard cut-out backgrounds, we wanted the whole overall feel to have a great arcade feel about it, so you feel happy in yourself. And while we are vastly superior in technologies if you look at our rain effects - you look at the rain, the droplets on the car, how they move when you accelerate, stop moving down the screen when you don't - there's so much technology in the game over and above just the arcade-sim experience that's gone in there. I mean, I'm extremely proud of it. To me, this has been more of a milestone in my life than even Last Ninja, which was an iconic game on the 64 back in the eighties. This is a lot more for me.
one of the producers is Eutechnyx
and look at the writting under the Glacius nick...he is from the company if its true...and i hope he says the truth and we can enjoy this excellent game....
does this game has g25 support either?
in mainstream market, but I have strong expectations for FC:TP game just because many hard-core drivers could find it very intresting.
