Codemasters’ latest driving epic drifts sideways and at great speed onto shop shelves today. To celebrate its release we talk to senior producer, Clive Moody, about the design philosophy behind the game, and the team’s passionate love of smoke effects…

Threespeech: First of all, can you explain the high concept behind the game? What did you intend when you started out?

CM: When we first started looking at the design, we had a good long look at all the racing games around at the time, and what they were doing. What we came to see was, they were less about the racing itself and more about the ancillary activities: modding the car or putting another paint job on it. From that point we just thought, well let’s get back to what a good racing game is all about, and that’s everything that happens from the point that the lights change on the starting grid, through to the chequered flag. We wanted to distil it down into five or six minute chunks of action. The line that’s been spun is, ‘it’s all about the race’, and it very much is.

Threespeech: In what ways does the Ego engine exploit new technology to provide a more exciting racing experience?

CM: That’s a big question. I should start by giving you a quick history on where Ego has come from. It’s been two years in development and somewhere in the region of 50-60 engineers have worked on it. The fruits of the engine were seen in CMR Dirt, but it’s an evolutionary piece of software and it’s evolving all the time.

Beneath the obvious stuff, the next-gen visuals, the high-definition graphics and sound, is all the maths, the clever stuff, in terms of the physics model – and that’s not just the physics of the cars themselves and the way they handles, it’s the physics of every object around the track. So when you smash into a tyre wall, it’ not just a solid block, they are all individual tyres – they bounce, they explode. And then the third element that’s hugely improved in Ego is the AI. Every single car on that track is fully aware of what’s going on around it, they’re aware of the space, aware, not only of the racing line, but of all the other lines they could take in order to attempt an overtaking manoeuvre. That’s coupled in with driver abilities and attributes – there are dozens of parameters that define how that driver will behave, how he will perform in the race, his aggression level, is he prone to errors, is he going to get tired as the race goes on and possibly make more mistakes, how well does he corner? Is he a late braker? Does he brake early and go in gingerly? All those elements come together within Ego to define what we can do with the game.

Threespeech: Are there new avenues of physics that have been opened up to you with this console generation?

CM: Definitely. I think the key thing is the frequency with which you can actually run the physics. The underlying physics engine now runs at 1000hz – on previous platforms we might have been running at 60Hz, so we’re able to update the car handling and the general car physics much faster, which means it’s a much more accurate and realistic simulation. With this system we know that, fundamentally, the cars are always going to behave correctly on the track.

Threespeech: You don’t seem to have gone merely for a photographic representation of reality with Grid – you have an art tool called ‘Enhance Client’ which includes a range of post process effects so you can add tints and increase elements such as contrast and brightness for the screen image. Are you going for more of a stylised look with the game?
Absolutely. We’re trying to represent realism, but we want to enhance that, we want to exaggerate it. It’s a terrible cliché to compare games with movies, but when you go to the cinema, everything’s bigger, everything’s exaggerated, everything’s more colourful, explosions and crashes are… well, they’re just bigger than they are in real-life. And we’ve taken that approach with the game, because it adds to the drama, it adds to the excitement, and visually it’s stimulating as well.

Threespeech: Does this sense of ‘enhanced reality’ extend to the handling? What do you aim for first, authenticity or excitement?

CM: You have to look at both – there’s a really fine balance between what would be an ultra realistic handling model and something that most gamers are going to enjoy. We don’t claim to sit in pure sim territory with this game, but by the same token we’re not sitting at the low-end of the arcade market. What we strive for, our goal and our vision, is realistic handling that feels like it behaves properly, but is accessible to the widest possible audience. It feels like you’re driving a real race car, but it’s pared back a little bit to make it playable. You put the average person in a race car and they’re going to go off the track on the first corner – they just wouldn’t be able to handle it.

And for those people who do want a slightly more hardcore experience, they can turn off the assists, they can turn off the traction control, the braking assists, the steering assists and that brings it much more toward a proper simulation.

Threespeech: The game is full of lovely little graphical effects. Lots of high dynamic range lighting, reflections and smoke. What are some of the team’s favourite graphical frills and where do you feel you’ve innovated?

CM: I love the lighting we’ve achieved through the different environments and the different feel that we’ve got – there are some great sunlight effects. Some of it is pure mathematical simulation of the lighting and some of it is… smoke and mirrors if you like, a combination of art and real-life physics.

One of the areas we’re really proud of is the smoke – just the amount of smoke you can kick up. This was essential really because drifting is all about getting the car sideways and losing traction; you automatically get a lot of tyre smoke and we had to find a way of representing that. So we worked hard on getting literally screens full of billowing smoke. You’ll see that when you play it, sometimes you’re really taking a leap of faith, you can’t see what’s happening on the next corner – you’re driving blind because there’s a wall of smoke in front of you. It’s really fun and exciting.

Keith Stuart