The Unofficial CM/Developer FAQ - READ THIS BEFORE POSTING!

[SynGamer]

OFFICIAL FAQ

1: What formats will you be releasing the F1 Game on?
Wii/PSP - Autumn 2009
PC/PS3/Xbox360 - Mid 2010

2: Around what F1 season will the games be based?
Wii/PSP - Based on 2009
PC/PS3/Xbox360 - Based on 2010

3: When will the game be out?
See point 1 above

Check out: The Official Game Site

Everything below this line was compiled from posts by CM employees. I simply searched through their posts and put it all into one thread. While this is (mostly) all unofficial, at the same time, you really can't get much more official until CM actually announces things

Regarding Development

Nothing has been delayed and everything is running to plan. We signed our F1 license literally weeks before our early first press announcement, i.e. before development had even started. It takes time to mobilise a £10 million pound project, including the dev team, fresh new design etc etc and this can't be done at the flick of a switch. The good thing is we're not rushing the project to turn a fast buck like others might do, and all of your ideas and suggestions can be considered for inclusion in the game as we have the time to do this.

Just to reiterate as well, our internal dev team are developing the 360, PS3 and PC versions of our F1 game. Sumo Digital are developing the other skus independently of us.

-Uncle Chewy

Regarding Weather

Weather is a very big area for us to get right. It's not something we've pushed in previous racing games, but is such an important area for F1 we're determined to get it right. Most of the features you have listed are therefore being investigated for inclusion, and with a good headwind we'll get them in...

-Uncle Chewy

I was reviewing our track surface module last week and I'm really pleased with progress. This module basically covers all the surface build up items you would expect to see over every inch of the track, e.g. rubber from the tyres, occasional stones, marbles, water (all the way from standing water through to a drying track) and all the associated properties of grip and heat, so for example running off the drying line in the wet will give you less grip and cool your tyres. This isn't all hidden under the hood either - we've made all of this very visible to the player, just as in real life.

I was also looking at our new rain code, which is something we've never really done that well IMO for previous racers, but is looking really nice for F1. Coupled with our new tyre model and track surface code, it's adding a lot of depth and strategy elements to our game.

-Uncle Chewy

Regarding Track Surface & Racing Line(s)

We (the team) discussed this many moons ago, though not last week, so I'll check on this again on Monday. Our surface system is able to support any type of material over any distance so it is something we should defo include. Would be good to see car tyres spread the oil over the track as they drive around.

-Uncle Chewy

Which is no doubt correct. My physics team will be tut-tutting at me on Monday.

-Uncle Chewy

Feedback from one of our driver contacts. Covers the original question and a bunch of other stuff you may find interesting. I've edited some dev bits out so it does not flow too well, but you'll get the general jist...

Racing lines are critical and the grip level evolve a lot through out the race week end but even through a session or a race – and this with out having the weather interfering. There is what we call the rubbering effect which consists in a very thin layer of rubber coming from the hot tyres on the asphalt. Obviously this layer is present where the cars drive hence the fact that the track is not homogeneous. At the beginning of a session, the grip is “more or less” uniform across the width of the track. (Tracks are often cleaned prior to an F1 race event).

Once few formulas do some session, we say that they clean the track and rubber the track, the grip level increase. If it rains between sessions, the track is back to a “green” state and needs to be rubbered again.

Dirt and wind can affect also the level of grip (I’m thinking of tracks in the middle of the desert…). Wind and sand will lower the grip level and as for rain, It will need some laps to have the track cleaned.

When the rain comes… (the fun arrives and the spectacle beginning … only partly joking) the tarmac then becomes more uniformly cleaned first and with heavy shower you have formation of Rivers crossing the track (very dangerous) and accumulation of water in the deep corner mostly due to the camber of the road in those places. Even if tracks have draining systems, water still stays on the track.

The driving line then changes for several reasons/effects:

- Mid-corners you can find accumulation of water at the Apex,
- Rapid changes of direction require high forces on the tyre and this is not possible so optimised driving line becomes less “pointy” in corners and you end up with larger cornering radii,
- Hitting Kerbs shakes the cars and this result is pick of load on tyres and possible loose of grip,
- Drivers are following the cleanest line so they all follow the same path. Going out of the path and you will loose some grip and cool down the tyre with higher level of water (needed when the track dries out and the wet tyres are getting too hot).

Higher level of water would have 3 main effects that I see right now… but there is may be more: lower the grip level, increase significantly the cooling of the tyres and increase the fog behind the cars.

Obviously rain also wet the driver, decreases the visibility, increases the risk of electric failure, changes the engine performances (not sure where it would go but if you want I can dig this out).

Oh… reading your email, I see I didn’t answer your second point (Does the usual rubbered line that is the dry racing line suddenly become slippery in the wet?): It’s a good question and I would say no as a guess (If you want I can dig out on this… Not sure I can found an educated answer on this one).

One last thing which you might be aware: the rubbered line has only few debris and at the end of a race or qualifying session the driver is asked by the race engineer to pick up rubber in order to increase the weight of the car and be on the safe side if weighted by the FIA on the so called weight bridge. During the race, chunk of rubber are accumulated just outside the racing line along the corners of the track. Those chunk of rubber stick to the tyre and make them less grippy (one good reason to stay in the racing line if you haven’t got traffic) and increase the weight of the tyre (good for the final weighted value of the car as usually you try to be as close as possible to the minimum weight of the car). For the story (French expression), end of race weight forecast calculation is using not only fuel consumption (different for each driver style and each engine) but also oil consumption (different for each engine and measured during practise sessions), tyre wear as loss and can include pickup rubber.

PS/Tip: Usually experienced drivers know where the rivers are on a specific track. A race engineer will teach a young driver before he goes out on a wet track where the potential river formations are. Your game could include a system of maps prior a run describing/sketching where the water is accumulated…

-Uncle Chewy

We're investigating this [wet weather driving line] now. Should be easy to dry out sections of the track that are being driven on, but it would be good to use the track height cloud data to properly define standing water areas.

-Uncle Chewy

[SynGamer]

Hardcore/Simulation vs. Arcade

Just shows - everyone expects something different from a racing game and everyone has their own personal opinion as to what makes a great racer. We'll defo be catering for the hard core community of course, but the majority of sales are not in this area so we'll have plenty of options, modes, scaling and design cleverness for everyone else as well. More sales = more budget = better game for everyone.

-Uncle Chewy

GRID was not a sim. It was tuned for out and out fun and lap times are an irrelevance for this time of game. F1 is different and will feature accurate lap times.

-Uncle Chewy

Okay, I've said it before and I will say it again... DiRT and GRID were aimed at a different audience to F1. Both of these games have been critical and financial successes for Codemasters, selling far more than each of their predecessors.

F1 will get a different treatment from us, which means heavy on the sim elements for those who want it, along with all the structure and appeal that a more casual 'arcade' fan would expect. Both camps are important to the success of our F1 game and both will get equal respect from us.

-Uncle Chewy

System Specifications & Performance

You will get some marginal performance improvement with some games, including F1, but the overheads of syncing the two cards [GPUs] and code tech together is very high. Not worth it IMO. Certainly not for F1 which will be heavily optimised anyway.

-Uncle Chewy

We always include support for the Xbox controller. With this, the PC version plays exactly like the 360 version.

-Uncle Chewy

The DiRT engine was enhanced for GRID, which is now being enhanced for DIRT 2 and F1.

-Uncle Chewy

We've supported multi-core for some time and will continue to do so. I'd be surprised if there are any recent AAA games around that do not support this.

-Uncle Chewy

PC will be scalable of course so you should be able to have what you want there depending on the power of your rig. Consoles struggle with 1080p 60fps for performance and, just as importantly, memory reasons. Last time we checked, we couldn't find any major releases that outputted at 1080p 60fps on PS3 or 360. Games that show 1080 on the box are either scaled in either the x or y axis, e.g. 960x1080i instead of 1920x1080i.

-Uncle Chewy

All platforms have specialist groups working on them within the dev team pushing the hardware to its limits. Where hardware allows, we always do extra cool stuff, and all platforms have some tech area that beats the others.

As far as the original discussion goes... cloud height data is difficult to manage due to memory, but also because of the more complicated ray casts and collision detection that it demands. We believe we have a solution that resolves this.

-Uncle Chewy

Regarding a possible Beta

All going well, we'd like to run a closed beta test with people we can trust. Long time posters will be favoured and we'll be using a good cross section of people around the world with different playing styles (e.g. hardcore sim through to arcade). Most likely PC only, though I'd like to include console if we can find some way of doing that.

We'll not be using Starforce (great though I think it is), but will be running an on-line authentication system that most probably runs sections of non-time critical game code on our server. This is another thing we'd like to beta test.

-Uncle Chewy

Just double checking on PS3, but we know of two ways of doing this on 360. One is creating a demo that is effectively a beta test. This needs to be submitted through MS QA, which in not ideal as we want to beta test early with rough and ready code, not spend ages polishing it up and fixing TCRs. The demo release can be restricted to territories, but not individuals. Again, this means the demo/beta would need to be highly polished as everyone would be able to download it.

The second way is to get a batch of red beta disks cut through MS (min order 2000 I believe). We can put whatever we like on these, but they will only run on test kits or dev kits, not retail kits. Again, not ideal.

-Uncle Chewy

A PC beta should be able to give us all the info we need on handling, set-up, compat, game structure, networking, online authentication system (if we do it - Spore seems to be having one or two issues right now...), etc., but if we can arrange a console beta in the time available to us then we will do so. It may be that this is an invitation only session at our HQ in Southam, in which case we'll send out an invite on this forum.

-Uncle Chewy

Drivers & Teams

Don't worry, we have Lewis [Hamilton] in our game.

-Uncle Chewy

Game Features, Modes, & Options

We're planning on having full length races right down to very short races for those that want it. Tyre wear and pit stops etc will be scaled accordingly so that they all still make sense. The integration of this and the lap length is still being investigated.

-Uncle Chewy

From the F1 drivers we've spoken to so far, they have all said that the vibrations the driver gets on some of the more bumpy tracks can make it impossible (and I mean completely) to see. The driver is driving on instinct alone. It's easy to replicate this, but we need some way of scaling this as it won't be fun for the majority of players. I'm all for pushing the sim aspects, but I'm not sure if I want to throw up every time I race at somewhere like Shanghai!

-Uncle Chewy

It [the game] will be available in the US and will most likely (but not definitely) be region free, as with GRID.

-Uncle Chewy

What do people think about this idea [to pause the game and allow us to change the pit strategy there]? This could offer more pit options to the player over the in-race system mentioned as there are only so many options you can select via keyboard/pad/wheel whilst racing flat out. Wouldn't work for on-line of course.

-Uncle Chewy

In addition to the many wheel setups we have around the room at people’s desks, we also have six permanent demo pods in our studio playing all the latest games and sims in rotation. rFactor, including the most popular mods (inc. F1), is one of these.

-Uncle Chewy

We own just about every racing game released over the last ten years and they've all been analysed and had their turn on our demo pods. You can learn as much from other people's mistakes as you can their successes.

-Uncle Chewy

This [AI and first corners in races] is a valid point. The problem is usually linked to AI running at less than 100% difficulty, though this is often only part of the problem. There are ways around this, which we've implemented in previous racing games and will be looking to implement/improve upon with our F1 game.

-Uncle Chewy

[SynGamer]

Modding/Modifications

Our game will not be moddable. The data structures we use are very complex to make the most of current hardware and we'd have to release a whole range of editors, exporters and converters + you'd have to buy a range of expensive art tools to work with them. We will be releasing an F1 game every year so you should get all the latest data you need at the highest possible quality.

-Uncle Chewy

Presentation

We're taking a really interesting approach to our menus that I think you will all like, no matter what kind of racing (i.e. sim/aracde) background you are from, but it would be good to hear your opinions on what you like and don't like about previous F1 menus.

-Uncle Chewy

Winning a race should be a real achievement and I therefore don't think spraying a bottle of bubbly would become boring. As long as it is skippable for those who don't want it, but who wouldn't like to spray bubbly on those they've just beaten?

-Uncle Chewy

We are not recycling tracks from GRID. They are all being built from scratch with our new, updated Ego tech in mind (which is much better than you've seen in DiRT and GRID) and will be fully researched, photographed, scanned, videoed etc. to ensure accuracy.

-Uncle Chewy

Audio

There's a lot of really cool ideas being bounced here and we're taking note of every good idea which is being suggested. Keep them coming!

Just so you know, there are a lot of factors to take into account regarding the script for F1.

The first factor is concern regarding repetition. Those who have played GRID will understand that whilst playing the game, the pit chief became annoying saying the same sentences alot. This was using a game script which was over 3000 lines in size (for just the English). Game mechanics will dictate that certain phrases will naturally be said more than others. If we record 20-40 lines with each driver engineer (which would equate to 400 to 800 lines just for the driver engineer) you can imagine the horrible repitition you'd end up hearing.

For DiRT2, the English script has more than tripled to over 9000 lines. Then, remember that we want to translate to FIGSJ (French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese). That's now over 45000 lines of speech to record, process and ship on a disk. If each line is 3 seconds long, that's 37.5 hours of speech!

So, for a comfortable unrepetative script, with variation per line, just for the race engineer, you're probably looking at a good 500 lines per race engineer. Multiply that by the number of race engineers, 20, you're looking at 10,000 lines before you look at the translations. And that's for just the race engineer.

Next, just because Codemasters have the license to create an official Formula One racing video game, this does not automatically give us any more than the permission to create that game with access to data to re-create an accurate representation of the sport. What I mean is, we don't suddenly have free access to the race engineers to get them into a studio to record a script we have re-created - and believe me, these guys are really busy. Anything more than access to the data will come from the results of the hard work the Codemasters production team are putting in to build personal relationships with each and every team. They owe us nothing, we have to work to get them to give us what we need, and anything we get is greatfully recieved.

I hope that helps you understand the process that we will go through to create a good script that not only works with our English territories, but the foriegn language territories which are very important to us.

-madfiddler

Great idea and we'll have a good bunch of voices, but most likely will not be using authentic pit crew (not all of them at least). Mr Maddfiddler would fall over backwards if we asked him to record and squeeze that number of voices and associated logic onto one disk...

-Uncle Chewy

This was/is still a crowds thread though

Yep airhorns galore..

As for the engines, we will be dependant on what access we get to the teams and the cars, through the relationships we develop, to record source material. Then we have to agree on how much memory we have on each platform, how much of the processor(s) we can use etc. For GRID, which as you may have read, the audio team joined the project half way through development, on the 360 for example - we had around 32meg of memory, take out memory for streaming buffers and additional code related needs we ended up with around 21meg and we had nigh on 3000 individual sound effects playing in that game.

We also need to strike a balance between what people expect to hear - from what they see on television, to what these machines actually sound like - has anyone run behind an F1 car whilst it's racing around a circuit? I doubt that very much... That's what mic'ing up a vehicle and recording it is the equivalent of, hence why things sound so different.

-madfiddler

Crowds will be an upgraded system from the DiRT2 system, which is an upgrade from the GRID system. We plan for the crowds to be a big part of the whole F1 experience, and have already prototyped a new idea which is sounding extremely promising

-madfiddler

Well, I started at Codies a year last November. From then until May, the job was simply to get GRID out of the door the best sounding we could considering there wasn't that much time left to change anything.

Since then, we've ripped out most of the different audio systems and fine tuned them. Written a completely new engine audio playback system, and we're now in the process of replacing the vehicle engine sound library we have, which imo is sounding a little tired.

DiRT2 is sounding so much better at the same stage compared to what GRID was sounding like. It's an itterative process, so the work we did on DiRT2 then gets improved further for the next game, and the next, and the next.

Car bottoming out... yep.. It shall be done! Tannoy jibberish - nice idea - saves on localisation costs, haha.

Fighting talk? hell yes - otherwise I may as well go and stack shelves at a supermarket!

-madfiddler

In terms of crowd positive/negative it'll simply be with the cheers. I'm not sure about boos yet, since you don't really want to play a game and for it to automatically treat you in a negative way.

-madfiddler

Traditionally our recent race titles have shipped with a minimum of what we call E-FIGS

English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. We also localised GRID in Japanese and we're planning the same for DiRT2. I would imagine that we'd run with the same for F1.

-madfiddler

[F1Fanatic]

wow you must have gone to a lot of time and effort to do that syngamer and this thread should be very useful

thanks mate

[SynGamer]

Originally Posted by F1Fanatic

wow you must have gone to a lot of time and effort to do that syngamer and this thread should be very useful

thanks mate

Thanks It's 4:30 AM right now for me...and i vaguely remember starting this around 2:30 AM or so...:P I figured we're getting a lot of repeat question threads so perhaps this could help.

EDIT: i found out that there is a 10,000 character limit on posts, too

[Longshot14]

Yep awesome, I feel a lot better about this game after reading this. I think CM really, really, really care about F1 and doing it right!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[xXSENNA94xX]

Originally Posted by SynGamer

Thanks It's 4:30 AM right now for me...and i vaguely remember starting this around 2:30 AM or so...:P I figured we're getting a lot of repeat question threads so perhaps this could help.

EDIT: i found out that there is a 10,000 character limit on posts, too

Bravo! good job

[Nortorious]

great work CM
game sounds heaps to good
cant wait for it
peace

[Harvey123]

I second the sticky thread!! nice work syngamer

[Zedux]

We always include support for the Xbox controller. With this, the PC version plays exactly like the 360 version.

does this means the PS3 is getting a special programming team? All games that are being ported to the PS3 Sony is going out there and making one better exclusive! We all know the PS3 has much more potential than the 360 see Killzone 2, MGS4, Uncharted 2, inFamous, etc... but this is a bit worrying from the PC point of view!

This means a PC with a much better everything will be stuck to the 360 limitations?
Could someone from Codemasters explain us this?

p.s. exactly the same game play means exactly the same structure!