和Ian Bell談Shift

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Need for Speed Shift – Talking Shift With Ian Bell



Two weeks ago, VirtualR readers had the chance to submit their Need for Speed Shift questions to Slightly Mad Studio’s Ian Bell, Doug Arnao and Erro Pitulainen.

Hundreds of questions have been submitted and while the guys haven’t had the chance to answer them yet, Ian Bell has been kind enough to engage in a discussion with many VirtualR readers in the comment section.

Since many readers will probably not spot his very interesting answers buried in the mass of comments, you can find the questions and all his answers below.

(粗字為Ian Bell的回答)

1.) Ian Bell used the ridiculous, hyperbolic term “data treasures” to mask the fact that Shift didn’t have laser-scanned tracks. He also tried to explain that Shift used car telemetry to re-create the surfaces of tracks.

I’ve never used the term.
We didn’t lasar scan the tracks. I’m not attempting to mask that.

‘Bell is the same guy who tried to sell us pre-release that Shift was a pure sim. That and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee.’

I didn’t. I did though say I felt that in pro mode it simulates the experience of racing a real car better than anything out there. I stand by that.

Quick word of thanks to the overwelmingly positive response
we’ve gotten from the community, especially all of the emails. It’s
really appreciated and I hope we came some way to matching your passion
with our first offering as SMS.

2.) Reading pre-release-interviews I always felt like: This guy is just trying to make a fool of us simracers. And you still can’t stop doing so.
And finally: How can a game with a maximum of 8 players online (promised was a max of 16 players by you) ’simulate[...] the experience of racing a real car better than anything out there’?
I do understand the point that Ian’s statements are part of a marketing strategy. But the massive use of exaggerations is highly visible and that’s a bit too much.

I maintain that this is by far the best racer of this generation to convey how racing really feels. The physics are built on the base engine we used in GTR2, with a completely new tyre model, input model, tyre to ground contact system (Physx). I was at the Nordschliefe just this weekend with some of the team and we all agree this is as close as it gets to modelling the whole experience. I don’t see any massive exaggerations, apart from the accusation of such

3.) While I disagree with the marketing hyperbole, I understand that it’s all part of the PR/marketing game. Their job is to get people pumped up for the upcoming release. I also have found other games to be more realistic feeling than Shift, but I’m glad SMS is taking Shift closer to a true sim experience. EA needs a game like that in its portfolio.
You and your team at Blimey have provided me hours of fun with GTR 2, and for that I’m very grateful.

No worries Paul, it comes with the territory and if you don’t ‘know’ someone it’s easy to scorn the marketing blurb.

What I try to do is state the reality as it is at that moment. Things often change during the course of a development for many reasons, some out of our control, but we as a team (most of the GTR2 devs) always felt that the grip, slip, scrub, regrip behaviour of pretty much any car wasn’t there in the competition, thus the new tyre model among other things. With the exception of some of the physics, the engine is all new though.

Handling feel is always going to be very subjective though. I’m happy with what we achieved, but then I’m biased

We do care as you say and in fact we’re listening to and collating the feedback on the forums to see where we can improve. It’s been a long haul for us as a team without a product on the market and we’re lucky to have survived and gotten this far. Shift is (thankfully) a huge success which helps us no end for the future.

Glad you enjoyed GTR2 and maybe with some mods you’ll grow to enjoy this one as much.

4.) I’d like to know, what he thinks about the modding of Shift and the Real Mod itself.

I personally think it’s great, especially as we didn’t go out of our way to make it easy. I haven’t tried any of them as yet as it’s been very busy lately.

5.) Ian, Are you including Live For Speed, NetKar and iRacing when you say that shift has the most realistic handling out there? Or are you conveniently leaving those games out of your comparison?

Everyone has their own impression of what is realistic handling. It’s always been a very subjective thing. I feel we simulate the experience of being behind the wheel of a race car better than any of the competition, but this might not be what you mean by ‘realistic handling’ . We’ve built upon a realistic physics core and added more realistic modules where we thought they were needed. We worked very hard with physics, sound and graphics to ’simulate’ the experience.

Many of the team race often and feel we’ve gotten closer than anyone else. I maintain that GTR2 was too difficult. I’ve yet to have a car break away on track as suddenly as we had it in GTR2. The reality is that a road and race tuned car is fairly easy to drive to the edge and slightly beyond. They tend to scrub off speed if understeering or oversteering and with the right inputs for oversteer, are generally easily righted. We don’t have fudged ‘aids’ in pro mode. What is in the game is a direct result of what we feel are authentic physics.

We do have some input filters applied when using a pad (of course) but the underlying physics are the same.

6.) I agree that the majority of current sims are way more difficult to drive than reality, but I dont think thats due to inaccurate physics in general but rather the lack of physical forces.
But surely theres some issue with stock physics in Shift because while easy to control, a lot of the cars seem to feel unresponsive and “floaty” (might be my controls, default wheel and FFB settings are SHOCKING out of the box, FFB decent after some tweaking of the xml file). Also they seem to have an alarming tendency to oversteer in situations where you just wouldnt expect it. Anyway, just wanted to know whether you guys were satisfied with this side of the physics because it feels quite dodgy to me.

Apart from the bugs (some UI garage issues and the bouncing) yes, we are happy with it. Most of these bugs are fixed and a patch is in testing now.

7.) Is there any possibility that SMS in the future might release a game/sim that resembles more what most PC sim racers are used to, in terms of gameplay features such as full race weekends with practice/quality/race, pit stops, total damage and so on? I can see why things like these are excluded from a NFS game, even though I wish these things would have been included.

I think I know what you mean in terms of people getting what they are used to and it’s a possibility, we certainly love that sort of detail.

The reality is that the vast majority of buyers (across all platforms) don’t care for the fully simulated race weekend, or damage that ends their race etc. It comes down to a decision of what we can do in the allocated time to improve the game for the majority and what a publisher feels are big wins. Being able to achieve that without delivering something generic or ‘common denominator’ is the trick.

8.) Hi Ian.Thanks for Shift, I like it a lot. Do you find it weird competing with your previous products like this? The most surreal part of the reaction to Shift, to me, is seeing people whose only previous experience with racing is in GTR2 decry Shift as unrealistic. As funny as that is to watch from outside, I can’t help but feel that something went wrong managing expectations for Shift – either in terms of the pre publicity or the default control settings or the garage setups (which seem awfully slide/oversteer happy). Are some better “track setups” along the lines of the ones you can load in GTR Evolution on the cars for a patch?

I’m happy we finally have a product out we can compare to our previous work. I use ‘our’ to mean us as a team of people because of course, we made GTR2 as Blimey and Shift as SMS.

I agree we could have been a bit better out of the box with controllers although we did allocate time to it, we could have set the defaults differently.

About the expectations, again I’m biased, but I do feel we’ve delivered a really fun authentic driving experience that works well also on consoles and that’s crucial for survival. We had a team of 85 people that relied on us succeeding to get paid.

There are a few bugs in the GUI for garage. Understeer and oversteer were reversed among a few other issues we’ve since rectified. The patch should be out soon.

9.) Classics are rather thin on the gound in Shift compared to “rivals” like Forza and GT. I’m probably venturing into NDA territory here but what are the chances of some DLC 60s and 70s cars to join the lonely Nissan? The tyre model does sliding beautifully and I really think these older cars would suit SHIFT perfectly.

We’re committed to supporting Shift long term with new content and patches. I can’t go in to what we have planned but I agree we do sliding well

We’ve worked hard to add additional optimisations for ATI cards with success. This will be coming in a future patch. In the mean time, using a profile from other games helps. I’ve heard that renaming the exe to grid.exe helps a fair bit on ATI cards.

10.) Considering that all of us usually drives from the cockpit, will we see after the patch the steering wheel turn according to what we are doing, instead of just few degrees? Do you plan to improve AI too, as they were used to almost stop in tight turns even in the demo?

There are some limitations on what we can do here based around the driving and shifting animations for one thing. It’s something we’ve only had a few complaints on so I’m not sure it’s scheduled for a patch. I will check.

On the AI, we’ve actually done a lot with the AI that is new, one being that the AI names are persistent and each has a distinct personality (based on 12 types I believe off-hand). They recall how you raced against them in the past and act accordingly in the future. They have been tuned for a fairly quick action filled experience.

自己覺得最後一條問題有點無聊.真不明白為甚麼很多人仍介意遊戲內車手轉方向盤幅度的動畫,既然自己都在真實世界有方向盤在手,還為甚麼要遊戲內車手轉方向盤轉了多少度呀?