11.03.2022 Category: Site news
Episode 10: Database work, website, and release VRC v3
The VRC adventure that started in 1995 with the development of the VRC-1 game port adapter had finally culminated in an r/c racing sim of some sort. OK, it only covered 1:8 and 1:10 nitro on-road but those 2 classes were the most feasible to do as that’s where our Serpent expertise was and where we had a lot of data from our DRX-2000 datalogger available to come up with something that was as close as possible to the real thing. Todd had done a fantastic job with the physics and had become an expert in understanding car-setup and even in driving these virtual equivalents of the real cars. Tony had done an amazing job creating the cars and a series of on-road tracks for which I had provided the reference material. Now it was just a matter of setting up structures for competitions, member registration and of course the Virtual RC website for members to be able to see the race results etc.
Database and website
As I explained in episode 1, we had started to work on the Team Serpent Network somewhere in 1994 or 1995. After a first attempt with a Dutch software development company, we coincidently met Marek Straka, Lubo Novak, Tomas Chlebana and Marek Simon, all from Trencin where they studied at the same university as Mario Hudy. Marek was an hardware expert, Lubo website, Tomas database and Marek Simon firewall expert. So we had all the important parts of the project covered. Through our early contact with the Hudy’s we got together and although they had very little experience in database and website development, I had a gut feeling that these guys were very intelligent, knowledgeable, eager to learn and super motivated to start working for Serpent. This was 1995, just 6 years after the Berlin Wall had fallen, Slowakia and the Netherlands were different worlds, Slovakians and Dutch were totally different people. A big challenge for all of us to make this work!
You should also remember that Internet had just kicked off a few years before and nobody really knew where we were heading. There were no hosting centers yet, internet was slow, access to the internet was mainly through telephone modems, a little later ADSL was introduced. Transfer rates were between 28 and 56 kbit/sec, can you believe it?
Anyway, I felt confident that my Slovak team could develop anything I would come up with, even though at that time I had very little understanding what was feasible to do. The first job was to build and set up an in-house server in Serpent. I remember they drove over from Trencin in Slowakia overnight, arriving at the Serpent factory somewhere around noon, go to work till midnight, slept all together in 2 rooms we had arranged for them, and next day at 9 till midnight same thing, sometimes for a weeklong. Anyway, they got to work on the Serpent web and database server and the Team Serpent Network. I think it took them 3 years or so to put TSN online and development continued as the internet landscape was changing fast. TSN was a very ambitious and advanced project. I have already described it as kind of a Facebook ‘avant la lettre’ for r/c racers. In my Serpent ‘memoires’ I will talk about this in more detail.
When we had started the development of VRC v3 we needed internal structures for member registration and license verification, a database for race results, a support structure, and of course a website for us to publish about VRC and for members to see their race results. All this was taken care of by ‘Team Slovak’ while on the sim side VRC v3 was developed.
VRC v1.0 release 1998
In 1998 we released Virtual RC Racing v1. This version was developed by Lothar which was the first version with true 3D graphics, it was the predecessor of v3. It included a few tracks like Heemstede, in fact it was our first step in creating a true r/c racing sim, but with hardly any involvement of me. It was more like a logical next step of Lothar’s own RC Car Trainer v2 which was 2.5D. This version used 2D (flat image) scrolling with 3D effects added to it!
In those days games were mainly distributed on CD-ROMs as the internet was still way too slow to download large file sets over the internet. So we put VRC v1 on a CD-ROM, designed a nice cover and we could start selling it as a Serpent product (see image below this episode). Interestingly, the CD-ROM cover shows the Team Serpent Network website, some images of VRC, images of the DRX-2000 START Datalogger and an image showing Serpent movies. I am not sure if this was part of the CD-ROM content or just referring to the content on the TSN website. Anyway, it’s clear that Virtual RC Racing was still very much an integral part of the Serpent product mix.
VRC v2.0 release 1999
Version 2 of Virtual RC Racing added support for 3D hardware acceleration via DirectX, since at that time new types of graphics cards with 3D hardware acceleration for Windows started to become popular on the market... (Previously, most games ran under MS-DOS.) Accordingly, the second version of Virtual RC Racing featured a higher polygon count and a higher texture resolution compared to version 1 resulting in significantly better graphics.
VRC v3.0 release 2004
VRC v3 was the first r/c racing sim with a deep involvement of the whole ‘VRC team’, Lothar for the game architecture, Todd for the physics, Tony for the graphical content, team Slowakia for the db structures and website, and me for guiding the game concept and features. Besides single-player, racing on-line competitions, dual player mode and a limited set of on-road tracks, VRC v3 featured replay opponents which you could race against in practice mode.
VRC v3.0 was no longer distributed on CD-ROM but could now be downloaded from the VRC website, yes, internet speed had accelerated with the introduction of ADSL and DSL! Download speeds of up to 16Mbit/sec where possible, a massive improvement compared to 56kbit/sec in 1998!
VRC v3.1 release 2005
Development continued and in 2005 we released an update, VRC v3.1. The now famous and highly appreciated AI-cars were introduced in v3.1, something never seen before in any sim racing game. It was a unique feature; I wish I had some video footage of the AI-cars racing each other or you racing them. As I early explained, although the AI-cars used ‘pre-programmed’ lines from a set of 20-25 recorded laps, Todd had developed them into intelligent, forward looking and anticipating cars. An AI-car could ‘see’ the car in front of him, judge its position and speed, know where the next corner is, and then calculate an overtake or a collision-avoidance maneuver, overtake on the inside or outside, at what speed, and then make the pass without crashing into the car in front. When an AI car had crashed with another car and shot off, it was able to find its way back to the racetrack, speed up again and continued its race. I could watch them for hours, every lap, every overtake was different. For me, the AI-cars rank in the top-3 innovative achievements of Virtual RC Racing!
With v3.1 we also released 1:10 nitro drifter cars (Todd had developed special drift tires for them) and TV cams were added to be able to follow replay cars around the track.
VRC v3.2 release 2005
A little later that year we released an update v3.2. The main new feature was multi-language support. I had asked Lothar to create a structure to enable the use of multiple languages in the game as I assumed that it would make VRC more accessible for racers from around the world. We had created a library where we could add the translation for every text used inside the game. I remember that besides English we had Dutch (of course…), German, French, Italian and later even Japanese. Lothar had to re-write the library structure to enable Japanese characters!
Why Japanese? That will become clear in the next episode when I will write about v3.5 release, that’s next.
Comments
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(Total posts: 6)
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Carol H.
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Edited by author: 10.9.2022 1:04:03 GMT
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Pieter BFounder
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v3 was kind of the basis for VRC Pro, but VRC Pro was built from the ground up and released end of 2011...
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Pieter BFounder
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v3 was discontinued in 2012, server was decommissioned
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Torsten A
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I own CD and box either. Never tried if this is still working in modern PCs.
Is the related database infra still available? I thought it was discontinued at some time after Virtual RC pro has been released.
-Torsten
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S.P.A Melle
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It's hard to imagine that this is the simulator in 2004. It's so perfect. It allows me to sit at home and run around the world. I hope to add new content (new map of car shell and frame) as soon as possible
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Kim Espunya
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I bought the VRC game on cd year 2006 gp001 V3.2. Very playable but the hard drive of the computer broke and as it was registered with only one key. I couldn´t reintall the game. I still have cd and box with new.
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