[360, PS3] Need For Speed: Shift

I love that cockpit camera work, very cool. This game looks very close to what I'd expect from a PGR4 sequel. It looks like it has a nice balance of arcade feel to it without being totally unrealistic.
 
RudeCurve said:
I love that cockpit camera work, very cool. This game looks very close to what I'd expect from a PGR4 sequel. It looks like it has a nice balance of arcade feel to it without being totally unrealistic.
Click to expand...

What about GTR2? ;)

Until this point, sim equaled hard, and arcade equaled easy on handling. The team felt that this was more of a case of the more realistic games not handling properly, as opposed to sims being hard.

I drove Forza and Gran Turismo, and real cars don’t handle like that. Real cars don’t skid at 30mph and keep skidding at speed. Tyres, when properly interacting with the asphalt grip/slip/slide/slip/grip and so forth and with driver input are very controllable. This goes especially for race cars with slicks.

Not only have sim games not been compensating for the lack of g-forces etc, but they’ve been making cars spin out too easily. If any pit crew gave a real race driver a car that handled like that, he/she [Dana Kirkpatrick] would take it right back and tell them to fix it.

I’ll say it here: when the team were at Blimey!, they did probably more than ninety-nine percent of the development on GTR2. GTR2 was too hard. It was too hard because the physics engine was lacking in some areas, wasn’t measuring enough parameters quickly enough and in the correct way.
Click to expand...

– AutoSimSport Magazine
 
Not only have sim games not been compensating for the lack of g-forces etc, but they’ve been making cars spin out too easily. If any pit crew gave a real race driver a car that handled like that, he/she [Dana Kirkpatrick] would take it right back and tell them to fix it.

I completely agree with this. I played some sim games and the level of grip feedback is practically nonexistent.
 
standing ovation said:
You mean a D-pad?

"Debug Cheat Code" is the last item on the menu. Maybe it is a development kit with a mouse and keyboard?
Click to expand...

No I actually meant a controller, probably using analog stick. It's typical for presentations.

While I agree that Forza 2 had some issues with grip (I've discussed them enough now), I still think Gran Turismo 5 Prologue's driving model is quite good. It's certainly not overly easy to spin out with a car in that game, compared to what was basically a bug in Forza 2's implementation of grip on FR cars in particular (and which I'm going to assume will be fixed in Forza 3).
 
Never mind that Slightly Mad Studios' COO Steven Viljoen helped model the circuit (and the game), it was that lame Xbox controller that screwed him up!

EA-Pressekonferenz, Teil 7

If I were Steven, I would have Eero Piitulainen (yes, the Richard Burns Rally genius) doing the real driving offstage. He was responsible for tire physics. ;)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
RudeCurve said:
Not only have sim games not been compensating for the lack of g-forces etc, but they’ve been making cars spin out too easily. If any pit crew gave a real race driver a car that handled like that, he/she [Dana Kirkpatrick] would take it right back and tell them to fix it.

I completely agree with this. I played some sim games and the level of grip feedback is practically nonexistent.
Click to expand...

Unless you connect it with a G25 ;)
 
EA AND GAME LAUNCH NEED FOR SPEED SHIFT UK CHAMPIONSHIPS
National In-Store Search For The Fastest Lap To Net Winner Nissan 350Z GT

Electronic Arts has teamed up with retailer GAME to create the ultimate videogame driving challenge: the Need For Speed™ SHIFT UK Championships. Starting on August 28, gamers will be able to put their racing skills to the test as they compete in GAME stores across the UK to post the fastest lap times on new video game Need for Speed SHIFT, the latest edition of EA Games’ renowned Need for Speed series.

Heats will take place at 49 GAME stores, with the fastest winners going on to face off in a final set of time trials to be held at Thorpe Park, Surrey, on September 26th.

The 49 finalists will then compete to set a quick lap time worthy of being crowned the Need for Speed SHIFT UK Champion, with the winner receiving the keys to a brand new Nissan 350Z GT sports car. There will also be a host of other spot prizes for participants in individual stores.
Click to expand...

- VVV Gamer
 
Shifty Geezer said:
That's just nonsense! The track is a track, a series of tarmac ups and downs. The simulation of the cars should recreate the response to those bumps.
Click to expand...

If only that were possible. Tyre manufacturers struggle to model the complex mechanical and chemical reactions responsible for generating grip in a tyre, videogames have no chance (and no access to any useful data, as it's a very closely guarded secret). Far better (and ultimately more realistic) to look at the telemetry from cars navigating the track and build a tyre model which gives you the feel you want and results which match up with real telemetry (IME).

Shifty Geezer said:
But whatever measurements you get from one car and its handling won't be applicable to a different car. Any parameterization will be a 'hack' to recreate a best-guess at how a car would respond. Now I can accept that makes a better game, but it'd also be less of a true simulation.
Click to expand...

You go anywhere near a forum for race sim development and you'll see a bunch of people worshipping Pacejka's Magic Formulae. Basically they are functions which takes as input slip angles/ratios and dozens of other poorly-explained parameters and produce longitudinal/lateral/aligning torque for a tyre. The problem is, nobody knows what those parameters should be for actual tyres (IIRC the only real data freely available comes from cross ply tyres!). Pacejka parameters would be accurately described as a 'hack' to recreate a best-guess at how a car would respond yet they are still widely praised by many sim fans, to the point of "You don't use Pacejka? You're not a simulator", even though any simulator using Pacejka is effectively saying "our entire tyre model came from guesswork and trial and error". The whole reason they are called Magic Formulae is they are not based on any kind of physics but the dozens of parameters can make them fit to experimental data - if you have any, which pretty much anybody outside of tyre manufacturers or businesses with close relationships with them (race teams, etc) doesn't.

The only thing closer to a "true simulation" is a full molecular model of a tyre. Hacking Pacejka curves or tweaking your own model until it gives you the response you desire is pretty much all a videogame can do.

Shifty Geezer said:
You can't measure and apply every force on every car in every circumstance. The idea of a simulation is to mathematically model the forces that affect the vehicle's internals so the model (chassis position, ultimately) responds to the virtual world the same as the real car in the real world in all cirmcumstances. Knowing 'how a corner feels' doesn't fit into any mathematical model.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately even "simple" mathematical models like Hooke's law tend to spectacularly explode when applied to stiff suspension in a videogame. For example, F1 front suspension generates massive forces for tiny spring compressions or extensions - forces which cause the suspension to move so far in a timestep in a videogame that an even larger force is generated in the other direction and it shakes itself apart. Constraining it to a particular range doesn't help as that's basically modelling no suspension (or I guess you could say, running on bump rubbers the whole time). A lot of what many people would consider excellent simulators are in fact excellent at fudging things which you simply can't simulate in real time. Phenomenological modelling goes a great deal further than ensuring your entire physics engine can be derived from F=ma, and having experienced both approaches I'm very strongly of the opinion that you can use Newton for all the high level stuff but when it comes to tyres and the actual feel of driving, throwing the physics books out the window and developing the feel you want gets much better results.

Ostepop said:
Forza 2's physics ran 360 refreshes per second, 120hz is nothing to brag about. Im sure GT5 uses a very high number as well.
Click to expand...

200-400 is the sweetspot really. Less than 200 starts getting into explosion territory and more than 400 results in diminishing returns, plus you start hitting budget limits - at which point game time starts to diverge from "real time" in some kind of relativistic nightmare :D

Besides I don't know where they got 120hz from, I'd be very surprised if Shift was running it's core physics that slowly. You don't have to run every part of the physics engine at the same rate though, or maybe someone just got their wires crossed and meant some other game system.
 
The cockpit driving view + sound in this game feels very visceral unlike other games where you feel like you're floating on water and driving in slow motion.
 
nfsyata.jpg

yataback.jpg
 
What does EA CEO John Riccitiello do all day? Does he even look at the products his company is making? I think the closest he gets to videogames is metacritics.com.

What underpins most everything is the dramatic improvement in our product quality. Back in 2006, we set quality as a top priority and we have increased our average every year since then. Already this year, EA has produced 11 titles with an 80+ Metacritic average [...]

I am confident that we will exceed the record we set last year of shipping 14 titles rated 80 or better. We will know in the weeks ahead when critics rate our big releases such as NHL 10, FIFA 10, Need for Speed SHIFT, Dead Space Extraction, and from EAP, Brutal Legend and Left 4 Dead 2.
Click to expand...

SHIFT is a mess and, ultimately, the captain of the company is to blame. Pick a category - any category - and I will give you a litany of issues that should have derailed production.

I'm convinced. EA forced its critics to write glowing reviews at gunpoint. Awarding the game a 'D' would be an extraordinary display of benevolence.
 
standing ovation said:
I'm convinced. EA forced its critics to write glowing reviews at gunpoint. Awarding the game a 'D' would be an extraordinary display of benevolence.
Click to expand...

This is true for all big publishers.

If you write a bad review publishers can be resistant to send you review copies the next time. Aspecially big ones.

This is why Perfect Dark Zero got a 85% average score on metacritic. Anybody who has played this game now that its horribly, horribly bad. But, its a big budget launch MS X360 game. You just cannot give them a shitty score, unless you want to start paying for the game you have to review yourself.

SHIFT is a mess and, ultimately, the captain of the company is to blame.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't say so. Job of the CEO of any corporation is to ensure that the company maximizes shareholder value. Going by their development model, i say they are doing a pretty good joob at that. After all, most of their games are not particularly good, but have extraordinarily good sales. Aspecially if you consider how good the game is in comparison. Army of Two sold what? 3 million?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top