Last weekend at the Nurburgring in Germany, Sim Racing Expo 2016 rolled in with plenty of industry professionals talking about cars, racing, and everything that makes them so exciting to replicate in the digital world. One such studio who attended was Reiza, recently known for their work-in-progress title Automobilista. Lead vehicle-physics developer Niels Heusinkveld used the Expo to host a seminar on the intricacies of vehicle dynamics and car set-up. The entire lecture has been captured in the video above brought to our attention by VirtualR.
Heusinkveld discusses many topics that sim racing enthusiasts may find interesting. Tire load, weight transfer and set-up changes are a few of the areas explored – analyzing such areas as the reaction force logic used to work out how a car should act upon weight transfer in-game. There’s definitely a lot of meaty information here that may be too in-depth for casual players, but definitely worth a watch for racing game and development enthusiasts alike.
For those who do enjoy driving and racing simulations, it’s understood just how complex the driving engines created are. It’s often cited as one of the reasons many simulations lack in key game-design areas due to how much time needs to be spent perfecting the engine and eliminating as many bugs as possible. Although Automobilista isn’t near the size of titles like Assetto Corsa at the moment, Reiza have the right priorities in place for nailing how a car should feel which should pay dividends as development continues.
A special thanks to Niels Heusinkveld for uploading the full lecture to his YouTube channel for our viewing, and to VirtualR for bringing it to our attention.
AWWWW KITTY CAT
Reiza has done a great job with this game, I had raced a few times in the kart track Granja Viana wich is present in the game and it feels close, some differences but the kart behavior was surprisingly accurate the tyres maybe need some improvement, the physics also but it’s an amazing game. Definitely recommended for anyone who enjoy racing in general and specially for Brazilians, not all famous racetracks are there, but we have a nice amount and a good number of nacional tracks in there. For those who are Barrichello fans, Vello Citta and the layout used by him in his youtube program “Acelerados” is there, it’s nice to drive there and feel how different cars behave on there, I would love to see the 918 in the game to compare mine to Rubens lap time.
I will definitely watch this video later when I have some free, quiet time. I love stuff like this. Thanks for posting this, Brendan!