Aquí dice que estarán vigilando lo que quiere la gente durante todo un año y adaptarán el juego a eso. No como con el Alone in the dark que sigo esperando un parche para el control, al menos para que sea igual que la version ps3, pero nada...
GC Asia 2009: Forza Motorsport 3
Your questions answered in depth by Turn 10.
by Cam Shea, IGN AU
Australia, September 18, 2009 - As promised, we caught up with John Wendl, Turn 10's Content Director, during this year's Games Convention Asia, but this was no normal interview, as we were armed with your questions. While we didn't have time to ask them all, we got through an awful lot, and John was extremely candid, and went into fascinating detail about Forza 3 and the development process. We didn't ask all the questions word for word – we've transcribed what was said, as opposed to what was emailed to us, but you'll know if it's yours…
IGN AU/IGN Readers: We're very excited about having V8 Supercars in the game, but what about Bathurst, or other Australian tracks?
John Wendl: Well, we've pretty much announced our track list. Bathurst is one of our favourites. If you remember, there was a track in Forza 1 called Blue Mountain that was inspired by Bathurst. So, we can't make any promises, but we're always looking at new tracks to potentially bring into the game as either downloadable content or for the next version, but we're not confirming or denying anything at this point.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: Will the regular versions of the V8 Supercars – the standard models of the Commodore and the Falcon – be available to buy and modify yourself?
John Wendl: Right now that's not in the plan, but again, through the magic of downloadable content, in future versions of the franchise you never know what's possible. But you can paint race cars in the game now too, so you can take the V8 Supercars, strip 'em down to a base white gel coat and re-livery 'em and paint them up any way you want, which is going to add a level of customisation to those that normally you don't get with a race car.
Go the V8s, etc., etc.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: That is cool, but I think this particular person is definitely more interested in the tuning side of things and starting from scratch to see if he can build something that can compete with the top race cars.
John Wendl: He can, but unfortunately it won't be a Holden or a Commodore right now.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: What do you think of the Microsoft Wireless Racing Wheel? One of our readers commented that he thinks the PS3 has better wheel options.
John Wendl: Well, there's a new wheel that we're introducing with Forza 3, and that's in partnership with Fanatec that makes the Porsche branded wheel. It's a premium wheel; it has 900 degree support, it has an H pattern shifter, a clutch pedal, and we have clutch control in the game as well, it has really high quality force feedback. In Forza – unlike other games – we separate force feedback and rumble. Typically, the physics simulators try to do everything through force feedback, and it doesn't work.
What we do is we simulate torque alignment on the front wheels, like when you're drifting or sliding, the front wheels want to track in a straight line, and we simulate the torque alignment with the force feedback of the wheel. We simulate traction with rumble, so when the rear wheels are breaking loose and starting to vibrate and scrub, we simulate that with rumble so you can feel traction with the rumble and torque alignment of the front wheel with feedback and it gives you a little bit better an experience to predict where the car is and how to catch it and that kind of thing. And that combined with the new Fanatec wheel, I think is pretty cool.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: The Nissan GTR – will it be in the game?
John Wendl: Yes and no. There's some details we're not divulging around that quite yet.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: So what can you say?
John Wendl: We love that car. It's a hot car. We're highly motivated to get it in the game. We can't confirm anything right now, sorry.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: Will the Nissan 180SX be in the game, and what's your favourite Nissan production car?
John Wendl: I don't think the 180 is. We have added some classic Datsuns into the game as well, though. My favourite production Nissan, honestly, is probably the 370Z, the new Z car – highly upgradable, I think it's beautiful to look at and its got a lot of body kits and stuff like that, so in Forza you can make it look pretty trick.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: Coming back to DLC – you're doing one pack a month for the next twelve months. How many cars are likely to be included per pack?
John Wendl: It's hard to say; it'll depend on the pack. I would say ten is probably a safe number.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: And what kind of pricing are you looking at?
John Wendl: Typically it's usually around $5 a pack for between eight and twelve cars. Part of it will depend on which cars they are, because sometimes there are some really hot cars that potentially cost us a lot of money to get. We have to source all these cars. If you've seen the Bugatti Veyron video (embedded below) we do laser scanning, we tape it up; it's a lot of work to go to to get these cars in the game. Then we strap them to a dyno, get their audio under load, we put a race pipe on 'em see what they sound like under race trim, so there's a lot of effort that actually goes into building this content. We don't really make much money on downloadable content. We do it really just for the fans to keep the game fresh, and keep it changing, so they keep coming back and playing it over time.
Forza Motorsport 3 – the Bugatti Veyron
IGN AU/IGN Readers: Speaking of getting the audio, one of our readers wanted to know how you go about recording and implementing engine noise? How and where do you mic the cars, what kind of mics do you use, and how do you recreate the full range of engine noise – i.e. from idle to rev limiter – within the game using those recordings?
John Wendl: I don't have the specific mic information, but I can tell you that we have something like 18 mics on the car when we put it on the dyno. We get the exhaust, we get the intake, transmission, key points around the car where unique noises are going to be emitted. If its got a turbo charger or super charger forced induction we'll actually bench dyno that separately and mic that and get the recording for that separately because it gets so mixed with the rest of the sound that you want those things to be clean. So to get all these source recordings we put it on a dyno and we run it just like a standard dyno – run through every gear from low end to red line in every gear, both positive and negative load, because a car will sound very different under negative load as well as under positive load. We get all that, and stock trim, with the race pipe on it, all that stuff.
We then go back and cut those loops – it's tied to the physics, so depending on what you're doing with your inputs, where the wheel speed is, what your input is with the throttle or the brake, or what traction levels are doing at that point, it will go back and pick the right points of those recordings and blend them together. It's a really sophisticated proprietary system that we developed to take these series' of recordings we've done and piece them together so that when the physics inputs are going to it, it knows how to play the audio back the right way. Cos you'll never hear, like, loop cuts or edits or anything like that – it sounds like the car should.
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IGN AU/IGN Readers: And there's not too much of a processor load to combine all those thousands of samples?
John Wendl: No, there is, but it's the Xbox 360 – it's pretty powerful, so we dedicate quite a bit of the core power to processing our audio because the game needs to sound as good as it looks.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: How much of the processing power is dedicated to the 360 frames a second physics processing?
John Wendl: Well, you have two primary restraints on any system like this. One is the CPU and one's the GPU. The GPU is used primarily for graphics, the CPU is used primarily for some graphics set-up, but it's also used for audio and physics in particular; physics and gameplay. So a good portion of the CPU bandwidth actually goes towards running the physics simulation, as well as the AI. And then the GPU is almost completely consumed with displaying the game at 60 frames a second visually. But we're doing things with physics that no other games are coming close to, with things like tyre flex. We model chassis flex. It's beyond just a rigid body physics system. We're doing things that race teams aren't actually even doing…
We work with Michelin and McLaren, and groups like that. McLaren really helped us with our aero modelling, because they've taken aero modelling to places that – y'know, how the air moves over the car and the turbulence it creates and what it does, so we partnered with them on that, and with Michelin on our tyre physics, so we're actually doing visual tyre deformation now. We do tyre temperature on the outside, middle and the other outside of the tyre. We do gas temperatures inside the tyre, which modify pressure, tread compounds, slip angle, all that stuff. We measure all that – it's calculating a tonne of things, to get the car to feel just right.
So that [way] a big old heavy classic Mustang with a twisty chassis and tall tyres will feel that way. Even though it's got a lot of horsepower, on paper it might look like it's a fast car, but once you get out on a race track, because of the limitations in the tyres, in the chassis flex, and how the suspension's set up, it's actually not that fast around a race track, compared to a new modern car. A lot of games you won't feel that difference because – honestly – they're not that different, and you have to simulate all these things to get that feeling, and whether you even know about it and can articulate that or not, you just know it feels right.
That, combined with sampling the physics at 360 hertz is critical because these cars can reach 200 miles an hour, and at 200 miles an hour at 60 hertz, you've covered almost ten feet, and there's a lot that can happen in ten feet that you're missing basically. At 360 hertz you're covering only about eight inches at that speed, so you just get a lot more fidelity and the car feels a lot more responsive.
Eight inches makes all the difference, my girlfriend used to say.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: Lets talk about the storefront. One of our readers wanted to know whether you'll enable garages to upload a car for sale which includes the parts, the tune and the paint as an entire package.
John Wendl: Yeah, that all comes along with the car.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: And will it be associated with a single gamertag or will there be an in-game system where gamertags are associated with the garage name?
John Wendl: It'll go through as your gamertag, but because of the storefront and the ratings system, people will naturally rise to the top, and there'll be the 'heroes' of our community who will be famous for their tuning set-ups or paint jobs or photos and they're going to be easily accessible. We also have the ability now where if you don't want to add somebody as a friend, you can put them on your 'watch list' for the store front. Say there's a really cool painter – you don't even know who they are, but you want to see what they're up to, you add them to your watch list, and you'll be able to check them out constantly to see what new stuff they've added recently… it's a way to keep tabs on the people who are doing the coolest stuff.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: Next one. How many tuning options do you have and how many upgrade options, specifically turbo timing and pressure adjustments, different stages of high lift cams and different fuel rail/pumps?
John Wendl: I don't know to what level or degree we can upgrade each of those things in the game. They all can be upgraded, but some of it depends on the car; what parts it has available to it, how it can be upgraded, but you can do full engine swaps in the game as well, so you can take a car that's a front wheel drive, four cylinder and make it a rear wheel drive six cylinder, which means you can tune it almost in any way possible. And then within each of those there are all these parameters you can adjust.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: Let's talk replay videos. One reader was saying that in Forza 2 there wasn't really a camera that accurately reflected what would be seen in a broadcast of an actual race, and so he's keen for a camera view that mimics race style photography – most importantly, overhead camera shots.
John Wendl: Honestly, the replay cameras on Forza 2 – we were not happy with those at all. We did them, in the end, because we had some limitations in the technology that, if we did anything more with them showed bad things in the world happening. We really tried to improve that this time around, so you'll find this time… since we redesigned the graphics engine, we have cameras that are capable of really long draw distances and wide fields of view, so we do have much more broadcast-style cameras now.
We also have a set of user-controlled cameras because we have this ability to output wmv video from the replays now, and what we're trying to do is empower these cinematographers to create these cool video edits. One of the ways we do that is – they can choose from the replay cameras that we've crafted, that look more or less like broadcast cameras, or they can go through and pick various user cameras as well. You can cycle through. There's stationary on the car, pointing at it in different ways, they even have animation to it, so you can basically take the same racing action, film it twenty different ways, then you'll have all this footage that you can edit together in a really cool, creative way, without having to try to recreate that action over and over again.
Great draw distance = potentially great camera angles for replays.
So I think people that were upset with the replay stuff in Forza 2 are going to see huge improvements there because, it wasn't very good, honestly, but like I said, we made a big investment there this time, really trying to empower those people to make great stuff…
When we saw what people did with V2 without that capability [of outputting video] – like, the Blackjack videos and stuff with drifting, they were able to do such cool stuff and they had to jump through incredible hoops to get that kind of footage. Now we're actually supporting it officially, and I think we're going to see crazy stuff, because it's going to be so much easier to get it.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: Are the wmvs the game outputs 60 frames a second?
John Wendl: Yep.
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IGN AU/IGN Readers: In Forza 2 it was often a requirement to win every race to progress through the career mode. Since this is not how real motor racing works, will Forza 3 be more authentic?
John Wendl: It is actually. You get XP just by completing races, so you can actually finish the career without wining a single race; it'll take longer, is all, because you won't get as much money and as much XP.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: Drift events and downhill races?
John Wendl: We have this mechanic now, it's called 'Always Drifting', so they're not specific drift events, but at any point you can bring up the drift hud, which is a little drift score – it's kinda like the Kudos from Project Gotham, and it's always on – you're always getting points for it whether you have the hud on or not, and there'll be drift leaderboards. We've got all kinds of new leaderboards as well, so the top painters will go to their leaderboard, the top drifters, the top tuners, the top videographers… so yeah, drifting is on all the time.
In lieu of a cool drifting screenshot, please find enclosed more V8 Supercars.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: But will there be specific drift events?
John Wendl: There could be in multiplayer… we've created a rules editor in multiplayer that allows you to establish guidelines of how to compete online against each other and what kind of race mode you want to create, so I think we're going to see emergent gameplay come out of that as people find new game types. And what will happen is, the most popular ones – we'll be watching, and then we'll probably make those more official and supported, or start to develop features specifically [for them], or even tracks. If we find people playing a certain way. Like, some of the DLC tracks we're looking at, we're trying to design to be playgrounds for this sort of emergent gameplay, and as we see people doing certain kinds of things; we're going to react to that and try to better support that and embrace it.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: I think what this reader was specifically referring to was Japanese-style winding mountain runs and that kind of stuff.
John Wendl: Pay attention at TGS is what I would tell him.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: With the new in-car viewpoints, will all the dials work, including the temperature gauge and fuel gauge?
John Wendl: Not every dial will work in every scenario, but all the big ones that you care about will, so tach, speed, fuel on most cars, boost gauges, digital gauges as well as analogue, like the Lamborghini Reventon has this crazy Star Wars looking 'stay on target' kind of thing, and it all animates and does all cool stuff, so each car we had to get in, start it up, see how all this stuff actually works and reacts. The Bugatti's got its horsepower gauge and all that kind of stuff. We basically went through each car, and some cars – especially race cars – have a million gauges, they look like an aeroplane, and not every one's going to be important to the player, so we picked the ones that we felt were the most useful.
Not pictured, the crazy Reventon videogame/dashboard.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: When you change gears, will the driver actually change gears with his hand?
John Wendl: He doesn't, right now. We just couldn't get that feature in in time, unfortunately. It was something we looked at, we had it close, but it was a little too buggy for us to put in… what we couldn't reconcile was that it was a very detailed hand with fingers and it actually grips the wheel, and it was difficult to get him to let go of the wheel and do this (moves hand off wheel) without his fingers passing through the wheel, because you don't actually do real collision detection on the wheel, and depending on how it was turned, there's a lot to work out there to get it [right], and we just felt like the visual trade-off there was too great. We'd rather have it not do it than look bad. And a lot of cars these days have paddle shifters so you're not going to be doing that anyway, so that's how I've rationalised it at least. (Laughs)
IGN AU/IGN Readers: Is it possible to roll your car or launch it into the air?
John Wendl: Yeah, you're able to roll the car now, so we've modelled under-carriages and suspension for every car in the game. Every car can be damaged, every car can be rolled, and already we're starting to see some spectacular results of that as you get multiple cars together…
IGN AU: Thanks so much for your time!
![[plas]](/images/smilies/aplauso.gif "Aplausos")
![[flipa]](/images/smilies/nuevos2/flipando.gif "flipando")
![[ok]](/images/smilies/nuevos2/okis.gif "ok")
, yo me hago polvo ![[qmparto]](/images/smilies/net_quemeparto.gif "Que me parto!")
. Volante + Cambio Manual + Vista capó + Fujimi Kaido = ![[babas]](/images/smilies/babas.gif "Babeando")
![[snif]](/images/smilies/nuevos/triste_ani1.gif "llorando")
![[jaja]](/images/smilies/nuevos2/otrasonrisa.gif "otra sonrisa")
![[carcajad]](/images/smilies/nuevos/risa_ani2.gif "carcajada")
![[sonrisa]](/images/smilies/nuevos/risa_ani1.gif "sonrisa")
,gracias. ![[bye]](/images/smilies/nuevos2/adio.gif "adios")
