20.03.2022 Category: Site news
Episode 11: VRC v3.5 release and Kyosho version
Once we had started to release VRC v3 the word quickly spread that there was finally a serious r/c sim on the market. No serious game studio had probably ever thought of the idea that r/c cars are actually very suitable for a racing sim, they probably didn’t even know anything about r/c anyway. And if they knew anything about r/c, they would have understood very quickly that it was a typical ‘insider’ hobby/sport, a very niche market, nothing like a serious consumer market. I’m afraid they were dead right.
Why did I think an r/c racing was so well suited for a sim? It’s quite simple to understand. The only feedback an r/c racer gets when controlling his r/c car is visual, what you see, and to a lesser extend audial, what you hear. An r/c racer has learned to respond solely to these 2 inputs. R/C stands for radio but also for remote controlled, there is simply no physical feedback. With VRC we have created a sim that gives you exactly the same feedback, but instead of watching your car in the real world you’re watching it on a monitor. And providing the car drives, behaves and sounds like a real r/c car it should be a very realistic experience, right? Especially as you can use the same controller or transmitter you use to race your real r/c car!
As so often in this Inside Story I have to put things in the right ‘time’ perspective to understand what was possible back then. In the early years of the first decennium of the 21st century, computer technology was developing at a very fast pace, ever faster CPU’s, better graphics cards, Direct-X advancements, internet, but compared to today it was primitive to say the least. Back then screen resolution 1024x768 pixels (yes 4:3…) was very much the standard, and 21” was about biggest screen you could get! With the best CPU and the best graphics card you could perhaps get 40-60 fps. In 2007 the monitor and TV market changed from 4:3 to 16:9 aspect ratio, and pixels started to increase rapidly, as did the fps rate. Today we have Ultrawide 3440x1440 pixel monitors and even higher resolutions, with refresh rates of 200+Hz, and easily getting well over 200 fps in highest graphics settings. VRC v3 was developed for 4:3 aspect ratio monitors, we had no idea what was to come…
The Kyosho link
When VRC entered the market in 2004 I had raised the interest of several major r/c industry players, among them Kyosho, Associated, Tamiya and Thunder Tigre. With Serpent we had our annual gatherings at the Nurnberg Toy Fair and I had built up good relations with Aki Suzuki, President of the Kyosho Corporation. We had a VRC demo corner in our Serpent booth which was ideal to show what VRC was all about, and also to show how much interest there was from r/c racers to give VRC a go. It was quite obvious that VRC had a serious potential to make an impact on the r/c market. Later that year Aki and I met again during the 2004 IFMAR Worlds 1:10 Nitro in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where we continued our discussions to see if Kyosho could become a partner for VRC in Japan.
I considered the Japanese market as potentially a very important market because computer gaming was huge in Japan with Sony’s PlayStation and Nintendo being absolute market leaders. Of course, Aki would have liked to see VRC developed for PlayStation, but that was simply far beyond our possibilities. But there were a few other major requirements for VRC to be of interest to Kyosho and successful in Japan. It had to come with a simple controller that would plug straight into a PC, it would have to be packed attractively and most importantly, it had to support Japanese language, and for Kyosho’s export markets also German, French, Italian and Spanish!
Japanese language
That’s where I left off Episode 10 remember? I discussed this with Lothar and as we had already a multi-language structure in place for VRC v3, it all seemed possible. Only to find out that Japanese characters were not supported... It took a little while for Lothar to get that done so we had filled one of Aki’s major requirements. With the help of the international membership that we had already built up after the release of v3, we were able to fill the language database rapidly. For Japanese it was more complicated, and I decided to visit Kyosho at their HQ in Atsugi, Japan. I stayed there for a week, and got the job done. I remember me sitting in one of their offices going through the whole translation list and checking things real-time in the game. And looking down through the window at the 8th floor I saw the Kyosho track…
Japanese tracks
At that occasion I visited also several Japanese tracks to gather reference material. Of course, Kyosho’s own rather small track (mainly for 1:10), Keitune, Boss Speed, Hokusei, and SPL 1 and 2, all these tracks were in the Tokyo area. Tamiya’s home track Kakegawa I had already visited during a meeting with Tamiya for Serpent business, and the Osaka Central Raceway during a visit to our Japanese Serpent distributor Central. So we had 9 Japanese tracks, just what Kyosho wanted to see in VRC!
Kyosho controller and packing
The last thing I had to arrange was a finding a suitable transmitter-like controller. Kyosho’s own transmitters were not really suitable to be converted to a simple VRC controller, but I had already spotted 2 very suitable controllers from Thunder Tigre which were also used by Associated for their ready-to-run products. The bodies of TT’s stick and pistol grip transmitters were ideal to be converted from real transmitters to simple controllers with a USB cable to hook them up to a PC. Take all the electronics out and replace the original potentiometers with versions we needed for VRC! I contacted Aling Lai, President of Thunder Tigre in Taiwan, with whom I also had a Serpent business relationship (some of you may remember that the Impact Street Spec came with a .12 Thunder Tigre pull-start engine!). We quickly came to an agreement to go ahead with this project. To make the VRC controllers stand out I asked TT if it was possible to give them special color schemes which Tony (our 3D graphics artist) had come up with when he designed the packaging. No problem! TT did a fantastic job on these controllers. And they also did the packaging for us!
Looking back at this now it was quite remarkable how everything fell together. We had Kyosho to sell VRC under the Kyosho label, 9 Japanese tracks, Japanese language support, a very nice controller in Kyosho red/black color scheme, and fantastic packaging. But besides Kyosho we also had our own yellow/black version made at the same time. What I had in mind with that is next.
Comments
Only active members can post comments
(Total posts: 3)
|
Jose M MModerator
|
I still have this package that I bought in 2009.
Then I bought the pistol transmitter that was orange, but a while later it broke when I wanted to replace the steering wheel spring with a harder one. I tried to buy another, but there were no more stocks, although there were sticks.
|
|
anonymous
|
I still have this package that I bought in 2009.
Then I bought the pistol transmitter that was orange, but a while later it broke when I wanted to replace the steering wheel spring with a harder one. I tried to buy another, but there were no more stocks, although there were sticks.
|
|
Tom D
|
The package on the left with the USB dongle, is the package I bought back then. It also had a sheet off decals for your RC car in it too. That set was awesome.
|
