Assetto Corsa Interview Questions

Will there be any kind of campaign/progression featured in Assetto Corsa or will this be limited to single events against the AI/multiplayer events only?

I can say that there will not be a career mode: all the contents included in each version will be available without the need to unlock them. We schedule to include a championship mode, but I can’t confirm this as yet.

Will there be a system that discourages wrecking? Such as the equivalent of iRacing’s iRating/SR?

There are going to be penalties for various driving behaviours. We are well aware of the iRacing rating system and we think it’s a great implementation and feature. We also noticed though that you can’t make everybody happy with such systems. Considering that we are an indie software house with small budget and resources, we must be very careful on where we spent those resources. That’s why we think it is better to give communities and users the ability to create the rating system that they prefer. Assetto Corsa will be moddable even for such advanced features, and so maybe with a bit of luck, some talented user might come out with the perfect rating system for everybody, or quite more probably, every league will create a personalized system that better fit their necessities.

Do you have any new features planned for Assetto Corsa in the multiplayer area? How many cars will be supported in Multiplayer?

Feedback was positive from the latest netKar Pro v1.3 version, and we aim to get better in Assetto Corsa, both in the actual multiplayer experience and most importantly in the management of the server and classifications after a race. We are still working on the feature list and actual multiplayer code; therefore I prefer to answer specific questions related to multiplayer when these features are completed.

The addition of laser-scanned tracks to the title brings a huge emphasis on realism to the title. What features do you have planned for circuits such as dynamic surfaces/drying lines localized weather etc?

We do have the code in place and we have created the graphic engine and physics engine in a way that dynamic weather and drying track can be implemented. I’m afraid though that we won’t be able to include it at v1.0 of Assetto Corsa, simply of time constraints. We learned the hard way some lessons in the past with netKar Pro. We tried back in the days to include as much features in the game as possible. The end result was that the sim was buggy at release and people couldn’t enjoy it.

This time around we want to create a software that has a very strong and stable core that people can enjoy and then start building and adding extra features on it. If you don’t make an enjoyable software for the community, then the community will abandon you and no matter what you do later, you won’t be able to win them back.

So yes we are working on it, we already going to have better grip on the ideal line and different grip on various asphalt patches for version 1, and we definitely want to include dynamic drying line and weather for future versions.

What’s the hardest part to make in AC, what features they want to have are giving them the biggest challenge to overcome and what are they the most proud of because they got it “just right”?

Programming the AI is an interesting challenge, because it is the first time we have done this. Being a small development team, each single aspect of AC is a challenge, considering the kind of contents and features we are developing with such a low budget. The involvement of real car manufacturers and race tracks makes every task much complicated and takes much more time. We are proud because the AC project is our most ambitious and most expensive project yet. But we will not betray our philosophy to make it as realistic as possible, even if we know that realistic simulations are not as potentially lucrative as arcade and sim/arcade games.

When Assetto Corsa was released you mentioned it would feature an open architecture allowing the title to be easier to access for modders. What features and tools can modders expect with the open architecture of Assetto Corsa

We think community input is very important for a niche market product. Nevertheless watching forums and blog comments is not always enough, because you can’t be sure as to how many people will eventually use a feature, a car or a track, everybody talks about. Modding gives the power to the community to express its creativity but also its preferences to whatever they like best. It makes a product more interesting to everybody and it gives developers the time to work on core features while the modders take care of “content”.

So yes, Assetto Corsa is going to be totally open and user will be able to create new content, new UI’s even new features if capable. The tools are not yet fully defined and we need far more time and space to explain how modding works on Assetto Corsa, but we are trying to keep everything as simple as possible and document every line we write on the various open files.

More information and documentation, about the tools will be available when the tools are going to be ready for release.

What other features are planned/already present in Assetto Corsa that you can share with us? Any plans for such things as driver swaps or dynamic day/night cycles?

We prefer to not talk about future plans and features, because we don’t want to raise expectations. We want and hope that people will drive and have fun with Assetto Corsa as it is. If Assetto Corsa is a hit with simracing fans then hopefully the sales will be good too and this will permit us to keep on expanding it. We have plenty of ideas on what to do next, but we must remain focused on version 1.0

Will triple-screens be fully supported? By that i mean rendering every screen independently so everything is in proportion on the side screens.

As you can see by the screenshots released so far, that are 100% in-game, our new graphics engine supports DirectX 11 natively with plenty of rendering passes. This means that it requires a considerable amount of hardware resources. Currently, it already runs fine on mid-level PCs, but before thinking of separate rendering onto triple screens, we want to optimize it for standard configurations, which as per official statistics, are more than 85% of total. AC will be compatible – it already is- with triple monitor solutions, while the kind of implementation you ask for has been scheduled for future release as we have to follow other priorities and scheduling.

We have all seen from the screenshots you continue to tease us with that Assetto Corsa has some stunning graphics to present a more realistic feel to the game. With this at mind do you know yet what the minimum PC specs to run the game will be?

We develop and run Assetto Corsa, currently, on several kinds of PC, including some entry-level configurations. One of the PCs I personally use is equipped with a Dual-core Intel processor, and an ATI 4800 Series GPU, bought in early 2009. Several screenshots we have released have been captured using that hardware. The graphics optimization process has yet to come, but I think we can consider this as the minimum hardware configuration needed to run AC.

Any plans on releasing a pre-release version to the public for testing before release? When can we expect to see the title available?
We’ll announce our plans by the end of August. Our intention is to release a “technology preview”, a one car-one track executable version of Assetto Corsa that will allow us to test hardware and compatibility issues on a very large number of PCs and OS configurations. Assetto Corsa doesn’t share anything with our previous products, so we want to test the code accurately well before we complete the development. This version will probably be good enough for having a first look of how Assetto Corsa drives, looks and sounds, and will also give the opportunity to modders to explore AC’s modding possibilities.

The “technology preview” is not a demo version of Assetto Corsa though. This will come later, after the initial testing and bug hunting of the “technology preview” is done. With the demo, users will be able to have a good test of the final version of Assetto Corsa, before making a buying decision.