rec.autos.simulators

(nice to read an ng where the topic gets discussed)

I read on a web site somewhere an interview with one of the programming
team working on Nascar 3. He (programmer) said that he could tap his
road car details into the physics engine and reproduce driving to the
shops (or something along those lines). If this is so easy, can we then
have........

1    -    A sim of '50s F1. Namely the front engined cars.
2    -    A Touring car sim. I read somewhere that the BTCC alone gets 1
billion viewers a season so there's bound to be demand for it, even if
not in North America.
3    -    A modern F1 sim taking the same approach as that with GPL. ie
reproducing F3000 cars and F3 cars in the same simulation.

Oh, and driving aids such as those incorporated in GP2 would be a must
to get it on the mass-market.

I'm aware that circuits and scenery have to been drawn/programmed for
each one so this obviously elongates the time taken to produce the thing
drastically. But surely if the physics engine is as good as they claim
and the only reason for Papy's existence is to produce top-notch racing
sims then they would do it. Most game companies would kill to have this
amount of material to work on for their next releases.

Should (are?) Papyrus consider licensing their game engine like Id have?

This could open up a wealth of racing titles from companies very capable of
producing the graphics, setting the appropriate levels for the physics of
the cars in question.

These could form the basis of bolt ons to GPL, using the cars & tracks as
they are developed by the third parties.

Byron, the downside of any sale of technology is that it takes away the
competitiveness.
If Papyrus sold their "engine" then the incentive for others to better
that technology is diminished.  Under the licensing agreement the buyer
would not be able to develop any new technology from that which they
bought under license.

Hi,

Just for the record, Papyrus isn't the only one with a good vehicle
dynamics model (aka "physics model") -- for example, Atari still has the
model that was used in Hard Drivin' and it's pretty easy to change the
input parameters to make it handle like any car.  The same people that did
HD wrote a new model that is used in the Silicon Motor Speedway
(www.lbet.com).  Also, we have a number of analysis models that we sell (to
car/tire manufacturers) that probably wouldn't be all that hard to make run
in realtime -- and they have actually been validated against instrumented
tests on real cars...

I don't think that you have to worry about competition!

Sincerely,

-- Doug

                Milliken Research Associates Inc.

---Jim