PROJECT CARS 2
Racing game standfirst
I’m half way through a run of hot laps around the street circuit of Long Beach, California, in a fully kitted out racing simulator, complete with triple screens and a $40,000 D-Box motion platform when I hear a voice I recognise from the TV say something in my direction. “Oh wow, you’re pretty quick, man!” “Thank you…” I reply sheepishly, focusing instead on trying to wrestle the beastly DW-12 Indycar over the boneshaking bumps whist threading the concrete barriers that line the track’s limits. As I cross the line to finish the pre-allocated number of laps, a familiar figure sidles up next to me, looing intently at my lap times.
The figure was Nicolas Hamilton; professional racing driver, brother of threetime Formula One world champion Lewis Hamilton, and handling consultant for Slightly Mad Studios. Along with SMS Chief Commercial Officer Rod Chong, Hamilton was in town showing off Project Cars 2, the sequel to 2015’s multi-million copy selling racing title, Project Cars.
Hamilton is also an avid sim-racer, confessing his love for the hobby without a moment’s pause. Having been a part of the team of professional drivers lending their feedback for the first Project Cars, being asked back for a second time to give feedback on Project Cars 2 seemed just as much a delight for him.
“It’s awesome, I love it,” he beams as we look on at someone else taking a GT3 car for a spin across the top of the unmistakeable Mount Panorama Circuit in Bathurst. “The hardest part is that all the feedback must be written, but I’ll give comments on the AI, the tyres, the way the car feels in different conditions… it’s all important.”
It’s my turn to hop back in the simulator again. Chong asks me if I have any preferences. Determined to show off my skills, I confidently asked to be put in an LMP1 car, in the rain, at Circuit of the Americas. Chong walks me through setting up a multi-class race which seemed as simple as choosing some different classes and tweaking a few sliders. Before I knew it, I was in pit lane.
Driving out onto the circuit I could immediately feel the difference in grip from the dry. Any touch of the throttle wanted to make the rear tyres spin out of control, so gingerly I made my way around the first corner before slowing pressing the gas to see what the car could do at speed.
“You’ll want to watch out for the rumble strips and painted white lines when the track is wet” Chong reminds me. I took the comment with some scepticism at first. It’s not the first time a racing title has promised this sort of detail - the kind that only a driver or super fan would know to think of. I immediately tried to use the curbs, confident I’d feel no change in the grip given to me by the wet track. I was very wrong. The back end snapped out on me violently, causing me to spin and slide embarrassingly off towards the circuit’s colourful infield. This is the kind of detail that comes from professional driver feedback, and is indicative of just how seriously SMS are taking Project Cars 2, as Chong points out to me later.
“We want these racing drivers to tell us when we’re doing a bad job.” he says with a laugh.
“A lot of people say that using racing drivers is a PR stunt. That’s a big challenge we have because we get guys like Nicolas here, we get people like (Le-Mans 24hr winning driver) Tommy Milner telling us our tyre model is something he’s not happy with. They’re hard on us, you know?”
When asked what the biggest focus area of the game was once production began on Project Cars 2, Hamilton cuts me off.
“Tyre model,” he says without hesitation, before Chong elaborates.
“Shortly after release we started planning what the new game was gonna be, and that came to us fairly easily. We also got some other racing drivers involved; who didn’t participate in the main physics development for Project Cars 1. Notably we did some tests with two of the Bentley factory drivers. We put them in the Bentley GT3 at Bathurst because they were fresh from the Bathurst 12 hours at the time. They had some criticism of the tyre model.
“There was a moment where the back stepped out in the car and they corrected as they would in real-life, and they spun. They turned to us and said “I should’ve been able to catch that”. So from there we had a lot to plan in terms of what updates we were going to do to improve that side of things.”
Chong was also quick to acknowledge that the shortcomings of the original had left the hardcore sim-racing community with some reservations leading into Project Cars 2, but felt adamant they’d done the work to allay many of their fears, particularly around the tyre model.
“It was always the same - there was no dynamics. It wasn’t dealing with the tyre as a 3D squidgy object that’s filled with air. So we’re coming in with this new system, and yeah, we admit that there were some issues with what we had in Project Cars 1, particularly when driving over-the-limit. But we’re coming in now with the next generation beyond that, and we know that it’s verified to be like the real thing. We’re getting situations now where we’re getting parity between real racer and sim racer, they’re getting the same lap times out of the box.
“I think it’ll be a bit of a slower process to convince the hardcore. We keep an eye on that community, and we know they look at us with a bit of suspicion, but we accept that. We know what we’ve made.”
the back end snapped on me violently, causing me to spin and slide embarrassingly