19.02.2022   Category: Site news

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 acceleration via DirectX which was developed by Microsoft. Developments were going so fast at the beginning of the new millennium that whatever you created was almost obsolete half a year later! And as a matter of fact, it only accelerated from then on to where we are today, super realistic rendering of a ‘virtual reality’, hard to see the difference between virtual and real nowadays.

Graphics engine and graphics card
The graphics engine is at the core of any game, it’s what you see, how realistic it is, in the highest possible quality, and how fast it can render on the biggest possible screens. That’s called ‘fps’ or frames per second. The higher the fps the more fluent the game will play. In the background the graphics engine receives input from the physics engine, what the positions, colors, shades will be of all the objects that ‘frame’ will be. The physics engine works with the input of the game-port adaptor which is controlled by the user. All these things must work in harmony, all have their own ‘latency’, the time needed to do a particular calculation or job so to say. The physics engine needs time to calculate the effects on the suspension, engine power and transmission, and the brakes of the car based on the user’s transmitter input, and then tell the graphics engine where the car will be in the next step, and in exactly what 3-dimensional position relative to the track surface, the X-Y-Z positions.

In the end the graphics engine sends all this information to the 3D hardware pipeline on the graphics card which renders the frame on your screen. The graphics card itself does several specific jobs like anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering (a method of enhancing the image quality of textures) and dynamic shadowing so the computer CPU doesn’t have to make these computations! All this must be done in milliseconds! The weakest link in this chain determines the actual framerate you get on your screen. As explained before we were happy to get 30 fps on a 1280x720 screen back in those days. Nowadays I easily get 250+ frames per second on my 3440x1440 screen…

Track editor
The graphics engine was work in progress during the years VRC v3 was developed, mainly to keep up with hardware and software developments. To enable Tony West to import his 3D track content in the game, Lothar developed a ‘track editor’ for Tony to enable him to combine all the 3D objects he created into the track environment, like drivers stand, pit area, trees, fencing etc. Tony would then create an export file with the track editor so Lothar’s graphics engine would ‘understand’ what it was receiving as it used the same convention for every track. It’s all beyond me, no knowledge at all on my side, I simply had to trust that eventually it would all result in a fluently working r/c racing sim.

View modes
As VRC is an r/c racing sim the obvious viewpoint was the drivers stand or rostrum, with a function key you could select 1 of 10 positions like in reality, whatever you found most comfortable to view your car. Lothar spent a lot of time to develop special zoom modes to have a better view of the car when at the far end of a track. Afterall, you must control the car based on the visual feedback you get. If the car gets too small you simply don’t see how the car behaves. There was even a ‘virtual flying camera’ for beginners, this camera moved towards and away from the car depending on where it was. Of course, we also had ‘behind the car’ views, I’ve never understood why you would want to control the car from so low down, with hardly a view on the next corner. Still, I know of quite a few racers who used this view even in racing mode and were competitive!

VRC v3 also featured TV cameras which could be used when watching replays of a race. Tony could define up to 10 positions around the track or even in the infield, with different viewpoint heights, and you could select any of them as a TV cam to watch the race or use the automatic car following mode where TV cams switched depending where the car was on the track. Quite sophisticated ‘view’ options, and most of them have been carried over to VRC Pro although this required new coding (programming).

GUI and integrated set-up
A game like VRC also needs a GUI, the Graphical User Interface. The GUI is used to navigate through the game. This is a very important part of any game. It needs to be logical and intuitive at the same time. Again, I totally relied on Lothar to come with good ideas for the GUI. At least Lothar had r/c racing experience (besides me the only one in the VRC team) so he could at least understand what I was looking for. But of course easier said than done. Developing a GUI is a specialist job, at hindsight I can only admire more what Lothar came up with.

Besides the general navigation GUI, I asked Lothar to implement a car set-up GUI. I have to go back even further in time now. With the arrival of internet, I saw an opportunity to finally share car set-ups with our customers, worldwide. We at Serpent were the first to develop and introduce this concept of sharing standardized and track specific set-up sheets for each of our cars and distribute them through the internet. Sharing this setup data was one of our very strong assets. We had developed icon-type images for each specific set-up item. Later all other manufacturers started using this concept and nowadays you can’t do without them anymore because the cars have become so sophisticated.

We integrated this set-up concept in the DRX-2000 datalogger software which we (Serpent) had developed mid-nineties. That same icon-based set-up concept was also used for the VRC v3 Set-up graphical interface. I think it was a very nice feature of VRC v3. Other great features of v3 were the dual-player and replay mode, and of course the famous AI cars.

More on that and other special features of VRC v3 in the next episode.

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