28.02.2022   1 comment

Episode 8: the famous AI cars and Dual Player mode

VRC v3 was launched end of 2004 and until 2006 several updates were released, the last one being version 3.5. For the purpose of this Inside Story I call them all v3. Two of the very special and unique features that were developed and implemented by Todd and Lothar were Dual Player mode and the famous ‘AI cars’.

Dual Player mode
One of the things we most certainly wanted in VRC v3 was the possibility to race against real opponents via network. It is important to keep in mind that at the beginning of the new millennium when we started with the development, the Internet was slow and transmission delays (latency) of half a second were not uncommon. Back then it was popular to bring your computer to a friend's house for a ‘LAN party’ to avoid the slow Internet! Really, hard to imagine now…

Dual player was a simple peer-to-peer concept over LAN, so you could race against another racer who was present at the same local network. Later some smart users of... read more

19.02.2022   0 comments

Episode 7: Lothar putting it all together…

In the previous episodes I have explained how VRC came about, and the very important parts of the project that users actually experience when playing the game: the graphics and the car behavior i.e., the physics. But in the background, all this had to be coordinated and put together with a masterplan. That ‘invisible’ job was done by Lothar Pantel, the lead programmer and VRC software architect. I have asked Lothar to share his memories with me because a lot of this I was never involved in, and I didn’t understand anyway. I owe Lothar a big thanks for digging deep in his own archives and providing me with his side of the story.

Lothar had some experience with his own r/c race game, but the VRC ambition was in a different league. The first thing Lothar went to work on was a new graphics engine that would take advantage of the extreme new capabilities of new hardware, faster PC cpu’s and ever more advanced graphics cards. And not to forget 3D hardware acceleratio... read more

12.02.2022   3 comments

VIRTUAL RC RACING – THE INSIDE STORY

Episode 6: Virtual v3 Graphics

The idea was to create an r/c racing sim with realistic looking tracks and cars, but how on earth were we going to achieve that? For cars we at least had the reference material available in Serpent, the 1:8 nitro Serpent 950, and the Serpent 733 200mm nitro chassis to start with. The 1:10 and 1:12 electric on-road chassis were of a later concern. It was just a matter of sending the cars to someone who could model them in 3D, right? But who?

In an earlier episode I already revealed how I got in touch with Tony West from the UK but worked from Spain. It was through our physics ‘doc’ Todd Wasson that I was introduced to Tony. Tony and his twin brother Chris were working on a full-scale racing sim called Racing Legends, with sixties and seventies F1 cars. When I saw the first images (renders) of what Tony had already modelled for their own sim I was flabbergasted. It was simply beyond my imagination that Tony could be interested at all ... read more

04.02.2022   1 comment

Episode 5: Tire physics model and ‘feel’

This is probably the most complex part of the VRC physics as tires are kind of ‘black magic’, and round indeed, Ronnie Ton was right after all… Vehicle dynamics, aerodynamics, combustion engines can be described with formulas that have been developed over time. Tire dynamics is a totally different ‘animal’ so to say, and there are many ways to go about it.

The testing data we obtained from Todd and Doug’s extensive tire tests was essential to understand how the tire, in the first instance a foam tire, would interact with the road surface, in case of VRC asphalt for outdoor on-road tracks, carpet for indoor tracks and later dirt for off-road tracks. Of course, we didn’t have data for all tire-surface combinations nor for all kind of tires used in r/c, but what Todd had learned from the data of foam tires and rubber tires laid the basis for the tire model used in VRC.

Obviously, a tire physics model for tire research purposes is something completely different t... read more