In depth: Devil's in the details: why Driveclub might finally be the 'next-gen' we were promised

The world at large

We're hovering just above the clouds as the sun sets over India. Each whispy formation is impressively lifelike but you'll probably never see any of this. Why would you? You'll be tearing around the racecourse below at 150mph, worried about how you're going to shave that fraction of a second off at the last corner. And yet, to Evolution Studios, the fidelity of each cloud is as important as the horsepower of the every one of its 50 cars.

"You can just about see the curvature of the earth, certainly if the cloud is high," Alex Perkins, the game's art director tells us. "They render at least out to 260km. And that's all geometry, there's no background painting. The atmospherics wouldn't work without that. It's got a true sense of depth because [every cloud] knows where it is in the world. Not only does it know where it is in the world as far as distance, but it knows where it is in the world as far as height."

Thinner air creates different sunsets, so the higher you are, the more different it looks. It's an incredibly minute detail for a racing game, but one that perfectly demonstrates how Driveclub dares to be different. Oh yeah, and did you know that sunlight will scatter through the windscreen differently if there's dirt on the glass?

As Alex puts it, "The macro feeds into the micro, which feeds back again." This, finally, might be the next-gen experience we've been waiting for.

First rule of Driveclub: Don't cut corners

Evolution has had a lot of time to get things right with Driveclub. When the game was delayed so its 'dynamic menu' could be improved every other department was handed a big fat time bonus. More wax and polish meant the shiny could get even shinier, the sounds even more authentic, and the handling more attuned. When you're just about ready to ship, 12 months is an awful lot of extra time.

But to build the best-looking racer ever made, Evolution needed to treat the cars as just a small part of the bigger picture. It wanted environments that were live and dynamic: no pre-baked lighting, no cardboard cut-out crowds. "Shoot it as if you're shooting a film," says Alex.

So that's exactly what Evolution did. "We developed our own technique for going out to do real-world capture," he says. "We had to extract all direct light source, and we had to hide the sun from any photograph we took and then control where the light came from so we could reconvert it… it required us to look rather silly hidden underneath blankets all over the planet."

That referencing wasn't just for the cars and the odd road, but for just about everything. "We were climbing trees and taking sections of trees out and then photographing them in the same conditions on location". Driveclub puts gamers on tracks in Canada, Chile, Scotland, India and Norway, every one of them captured on location.

"If you know these parts of the world, you'll recognise these roads," says Alex. "I've noticed Neogaf has pretty much nailed some of the locations that we've done within 20 kilometers, even though [we put no] information out there."

India was a particularly tough nut to crack. The team needed to know how light would reflect off every different type of plant in the area, but much of India's plantation isn't indigenous. "We actually ended up spending an afternoon with a botanist to work out what was going on in the jungle, get lots of reference for all the foliage, make sure we had a decent sense of how they all lit," Alex says.

"In the tea plantations themselves, the level of detail goes down to a single leaf. [We] even scatter the light through the leaves so you get different colours on the backsides to the frontsides. You get transmission through the leaves and that goes for every tree all the way through the entire level that's done to everything. There's no special shader just for the ones close to the track."

Wind speeds and rainfall vary, cloud thickness is forever changing, altering the sun's cast. It's these meticulous details that will set Driveclub apart from its peers. But what's it all for? Surely the last thing on anyone's mind is going to be how good the backs of the tree leaves look. Just don't suggest that to Alex. He spent years researching the effects of "the micro" on the brain and is well prepared to retaliate.

"Whether it's car, whether it's tarmac, whether it's foliage, whether it's bark, whether it's just the way the lights come off the shops - it all makes that difference," he says.

"Your eye really isn't looking at that one centre spot. There's a blind spot about the size of your thumb in front of your eyes but you never notice it. Your eyes are taking in so much information continuously, and it all adds to that sense of speed, sense of location. Some of these point to points, when you're in the supercars doing 220mph in a straight line and there are 12 of you going, its scary and your heart races, and that isn't really achievable without this level of consistency."

Then Alex even gives us an interesting anecdote about how Chile's salt flats were designed. "We tried mimicking real salt but I ended up crushing corn flakes to make it look like a cracked salty surface, and then actually sampled that"

Second rule of Driveclub: Don't break the sound barrier

If you're going to get fussy about the way light diffuses through a leaf, sacrificing any fidelity in in the cars' audio would be criminal.

Up to 16 microphones were placed in and around each of the game's 50 cars to capture noise from both the inside and out. "Every fluctuation in the track, every bump, will affect how the engine oscillates," audio engineer Tim Shepherd tells TechRadar.

"It's absolutely one to one with physics, there's no intermediate layer. So what the physics are doing, what the tachometer says, is exactly what the audio produces."

Evolution has moved beyond the loop-based recordings it used for the World Rally Champion games and well past the arcade sounds of MotorStorm. "We still use loops but we use two other layers as well… we've gone full circle and back to making it sound as close as we can to the car."

First, second, third gear sweeps, held rev points - every audio detail of every car has been captured, 10 times more sample data than Evolution has taken on any game in the past.

"We got into so much detail that even BMW and Mercedes requested to have copies of the recordings to replace their own," Shepherd tells us.

Interestingly, the audio team realised that a lot of people won't know what these cars sound like in real life, but do watch YouTube videos. So when it came to audio fidelity, a balance was struck between internet clips of these vehicles and the real thing.

Having the right people to drive the cars was important too. Working on driving games in the past, the team found that people were less willing to push the boundaries of the cars that they owned. For Driveclub, Evolution needed drivers who were willing to go hell for leather. And you can bet that it found them.

Start your engines

Third rule of Driveclub: Handle with care

Evolution was ambitious with its environs but at least the plan was clear: make the world as real and dynamic as possible. When it came to the cars things weren't as straightforward. It needed a game that fell just short of being a "driving simulator"; something that could be enjoyed by both the Gran Turismo audience and the more casual adrenaline chasers.

"We wanted it to be a very realistic handling model but at the same time it needed to be accessible for all players. We still wanted the hardcore people to enjoy driving this," says David Kirk, physics lead at Evolution.

"The braking times are all better than reality, and that's one of the examples of the things we do to make it easier for players. So it's not going to punish you by making you have to brake halfway down the road. You tend to not judge your braking points the same."

There are a number of driving aids that Evolution has included but you won't notice them interfering with the handling - nor will they dumb down the character of the cars. You can still drift your way around the course, and yes, you will still be punished for braking late. "We've got several layers of helpers in there but at no point do we let them spoil the experience," says David.

"The Aerial Atom is a bonkers car because the weight is so far back," he gives by way of example. "You'd put it in the game and it was incredibly difficult to drive until we put these little helpers here and there."

For the same reason, car damage also needed to be cosmetic. Driving an Aston Martin and a Mini Cooper into a wall at 100mph is going to yield different results, so the team had to make sure that this was altered for the sake of consistency in order to make player vs player challenges fair.

Each car took around seven months to build. And here's something else that might blow your mind: the temperature gauges on the car dashboards actually work. But again, allowing temperature and altitude to affect handling would create yet another variable, so Evolution didn't let it.

As it stands, in another ridiculously small detail that feeds into Alex's "macro", though the team say it's something they could potentially switch on down the line.

Fourth rule of Driveclub: Don't be antisocial

Driveclub wants to be the first 'social racer'. And by that, it doesn't just want to make multiplayer a little more accessible or a little more fun, but it wants to have its own global social network.

The problem was that, come last year's shipping deadline, it "wasn't seamless", says game director Paul Rustchynsky. Synchronous and asynchronous racing had to both be fluidly accessible, all via the dynamic tiled-based menu that will greet you every time you enter Driveclub.

You can send out challenges to members of your own club, or send them out publically with the potential for hundreds of people taking it on. Or you could set up some club vs club action.

The game lets you book races in advance by hours or even days using a slot system, while an ever-present activity feed will keep you up to date with all your friends' progress.

Everything else considered, it's surprising that it was these social features that caused Driveclub to be delayed for an entire year. But, for better or worse, it will likely be these social aspects that Driveclub lives or dies on.

Evolution believes that last November, it had the best racer ever made. When the game is released a year later, the studio is fully confident that none of that will have changed. And when you consider that it runs at 1080p, 30fps, perhaps this is the game to end the great Xbox One/PS4 resolutiongate bickering.

It's certainly something to think about when, come October, you're able to glimpse that Indian sunset, or see its incredibly real reflection in the bodywork of a Pagani Zonda R. From the detail in the tarmac, the the leaves on the trees, to the dynamic weather conditions that are never the same, Evolution can surely be proud of what it's achieved, no matter how the game is received come October.

It's a perfectionism that even veered into the danger zone. Venturing into India, art director Alex Perkins tells us, the team found themselves in one particularly memorable traffic jam.

"I turn around in the back seat, look through the back window and a bull elephant is rearing trumpet up, doing a full blast, and then charged the car. I promptly almost died of a heart attack and screamed at the driver to accelerate away. But as you can see, it was worth stopping for the vista."

Taking in that view, it's difficult to argue.

from Techradar - All the latest technology news http://ift.tt/1p6x8lF