A new month has begun and with it comes some great news about Project CARS development that i believe you will enjoy.
Two new tracks were announced,
Old Northampton (Historic Silverstone ‘75) and
Fort Felix (fictitious). The last one looks just fabulous and has been the stage of some amazing screenshot sessions by the community as you can see below.
There have been also a lot of amazing new implementations in terms of physics and car behavior into the game that have changed the feeling and the way the cars respond greatly.
Penalty Systems (Ballast Weight): Is a weight ballast system for performance balancing of cars/players, particularly in MP but also for single player stuff as well, they will allow cars with different performance levels to compete with each other in a much more balanced way.
There will be 2 modes:
Manual - Ballast can be added to balance the performance of cars when setting up an event/championship for single and multiplayer modes by the event creator. Ballast weight can be added up to a maximum defined for each vehicle in 1kg steps.
Automatic - Additional weight will be added to a player’s vehicle, up to a pre-defined maximum, based on previous race results in a series/championship/group of races in either single or multiplayer mode. This weight penalty would not have an effect outside of the specific series where Success Ballast is set to be active.
Air Pressure and Altitude Based Air Temp – Now it’s possible to generate air pressure (pa) and altitude base air temp based on altitude of the track. This will affect your car performance greatly depending on the track height which adds more realism into the game.
Volumetric Throttle System – This is a new feature that calculates torque output using an approximated manifold pressure. Side effects include air restrictor effects, possible better metrics for sound system to use, fun engine response changes with the atmosphere among other things. One of the things it will also do is change the 'neutral' throttle position - where the engine is producing zero net torque - to be much lower in the pedal's travel. You'll have much better precision over the torque and the sensitivity curve will change naturally through the rpm range. A great side effect is that you get much more of a feel for the clutch bite point from standstill. Because you have a certain amount of air going in to the engine at idle and air is directly related to torque, as the clutch starts to bite and rpm drops the air available produces more torque.
Brake Mapping - This controls the level of engine braking and is a fairly abstract value. Think of it like a vacuum line connected to the throttle, so that it opens up more at high rpm to relieve some of the intake manifold vacuum (the major source of engine braking torque). All you really need to know is that 0=lots of engine braking and 10+=very little engine braking.
Restrictor Size - This changes the size of the restrictors/throttle bodies on the engine to control the amount of power produced. This will ultimately move out of the setup screen and become part of the event setup, only adjustable by the event administrator. For now it needs to be somewhere everyone can work with for testing. As a result it's possible to create a 600hp Asano X4, for example. Honor system will be required for multiplayer with these cars. Do play around with this on the cars that have it enabled. A particularly cool one is the Caper stock car which has a minimum restrictor size similar to what was used at restrictor plate tracks in 1990. You'll notice that not only does the power level reduce from 650 to 400hp, but it also moves down to a much lower rpm simulating the choking effect of the smaller air aperture. Cool stuff.
So as you can see, all these features will work together, gone is the time of the large 'deadzone' when you start to press the pedal; the engine starts producing positive torque very quickly now and you will have a much larger range for modulation.
Snappier throttle response at low rpm. A car's peak power may vary a bit from track to track. This is because we now use ambient air pressure as part of the engine torque calculations, so things like elevation and weather will have an impact on engine performance.
A improved tire model was also included, it’s a non-race able version currently, that allows us to see how flat spotting will work in the future and so far the results have been great !
Amongst these changes there have been some new info about Project CARS moving to Steam in the near future allowing everyone to access all the great features that Steam allows:
For those unaware, here are some of the benefits of the Steamworks platform:
Authentication
Friends system
Invitation system
Achievements
Matchmaking
Ranking system
Leaderboards
Ghost storage for all players
VOIP
DLC packages
Community portal
Digital delivery and automatic updates
These are just some of the great features and benefits but there will be more.
That's all for now, here's some images and videos for you to check out, also be sure to join us at our
Steam Group for the latest news and info about pCARS.
http://youtu.be/FP_lXMsjbvg
