Project CARS 2 Announcement Trailer and Insider Info

About a week ago, a mystery Project Cars 2 trailer was leaked on the web. While the video looked very authentic, it was not immediately clear where it originated. Many community members were convinced that the video was a leaked announcement trailer. Today it is confirmed that they were right.

Slightly Mad Studios now officially released the Project CARS 2 announcement trailer. The new video includes many cut scenes we could already admire in the unofficial leaked footage. Besides letting us have a sneak peek at some of the new content, the trailer preeminently showcases the enhanced dynamic weather system. In combination with the impressive Project CARS 2 lighting system, features such as changeable wind directions, rain, standing water, snow, and ice will make Pcars 2 look even more stunning than the original. One feature that is currently not hinted in the trailer, or listed in the official game announcement is VR compatibility. We hope to get some more info on this topic soon.

Project CARS 2 will become available late 2017 for the PC, Playstation 4, Xbox One, and Steam OS.

Game Features:

Building upon the huge success of Project CARS being one of the highest-rated and fastest-selling racing games of this generation, Project CARS 2 continues to expand and dominate with…

• The largest track roster ever – 60+ unique locations and 200+ courses including ‘loose surface racing’ on dirt, gravel, mud, and snow. All will have dynamic time of day and weather allowing you to play anytime, anywhere
• The widest variety of motorsports –  with 8 different disciplines now including Rallycross, Hillclimbs, and Touge. 170+ cars from over 40 different vehicle classes including never-before-seen Concepts and Banned Race Cars
• Co-op Career – Play as the Teammate Driver, Spotter, Driver Swap, or Co-Pilot. More choices, more opportunities, more strategy, greater risks and greater rewards
• Seamlessly Connected – Socialize and compete via Online Track Days, have players from around the world take the place of AI-controlled drivers in your solo play, and get news updates on the Driver Network around you
• Pro eSports Racing – Skill & Behavioural-based matchmaking, create your own Online Racing Seasons, and Live Broadcast and Spectator functionality
• Your home for racing – Your own personal, customizable Test Track to tune and test your cars. Invite others to showcase your passion for racing and learn racecraft and engineering with the Project CARS Academy

 

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Ian Bell about Project CARS 2

On the gtplanet.net Forums, Ian Bell, CEO at Slightly Mad Studios responded to a few interesting questions by the community. Ian’s answers provided us with some new insider info. Below, we have listed a few answers that might be of interest. (Check out the original thread at gtplanet.net for the full Q & A parts.)

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• Every new track we’ve added is laser scanned (or our new trick drone scanning method). We’re also scanning some of the old tracks that weren’t previously scanned. I don’t have the list to hand but the Nordschleife is now fully scanned (as is the Nurburgring GP circuit).
• Yes, a drone-based ‘photo scanning’ aerial photogrammetry system.
• You’re correct. The difference really is imperceptible because we always abstract the point cloud anyway. The little vaunted additional benefits that drones provide are variable height scanning (which gets us much more detail on the off-track terrain) and the ability to place the drone at known camera points to capture more detail there.
• We’re still working on multiplayer features. I have 10 full time dedicated multiplayer coding staff on the project now and we’re working very hard to deliver all that we want to deliver. That delivery list is VERY long though and at some point very soon we have to stop new feature work and move to bug fixing and polish. So I can’t say for sure yet sorry. Our main focus has been on improving the ‘acuity’ of the online experience; on dealing properly with griefing (wreckers) and dealing more efficiently with those suffering temporary connection issues.
• I can’t give specifics (man those car companies are strict these days!) but we have things that we didn’t have before from your list that will make you happy.
  I’d love to do a new GTR as it was so focused but we need to be more broad these days to sell the amounts required to justify a sequel. Hence the long delay since we made GTR2.
• Flaunting my new found ability to answer two posts in a row I can say that we have a little more in the bank there that you don’t know of yet and we have been working for 14 months on perfecting oval AI behavior… I say ‘perfecting’ but ‘making it good enough’ would probably be more accurate as nothing is ever perfect. We also have more US based circuits that we haven’t announced yet that should please our fans from that region.
• We created a pretty decent livery system for Shift but it comes with many downsides. You need to reduce the online car limits as the liveries come with a memory overhead. For pCARS we have massive fields on 24-hour tracks like Le Mans and for that reason, we had to restrict livery work. It’s a tough choice but I think it’s the correct one.
• We have massively increased the detail on tracks in terms of using fully 3d trees, adding live track details, etc. So while the overhead is increased, we’ve also worked very hard to improve efficiency. On dual cards and on AMD kit in particular we are much faster than we were before. We’re running at 90+% efficiency with crossfire and we’ve optimized other areas massively. We have more to do but a fair summation would be that you’ll get more quality for less kit in pCARS2.
• es, we cut Touge and Hillclimb. They were part of the initial ‘vision’ but not the post ‘pre-production’ plans. They simply felt excessively niche and didn’t appeal to a large swathe of the potential punters. So they’re not on the radar at the moment. We’ve doubled down on the areas people enjoyed and added much more content there, in a big way.
• I can’t give car specifics before the list comes out sorry.
• We have a much more varied offline experience than before, it’s safe for me to say that
  We’ve left almost nothing out of the roster we had before and added a lot (loads!) more for this one. We’ve also updated all of those tracks to the new standards.
• We’re still full bore for ‘Septemberish’ but there’s no way we’re shipping this one before it’s properly QA’d and sensibly bug free. So it’s a case of ‘when it’s done’.
• Yes. We have new physics and from that falls out new FFB. For this one we’re shipping (as of now) 3 FFB preset options (we default 1 of course) that you can single click and get (hopefully!) the feel you prefer from the feedback. I’m biased but it’s a huge step forward from the rocket science we had before. That rocket science is still hidden in sub menus and accessible for the more masochistic
• Yes. We really wanted to do the normal Suzuka but they are a little insane on pricing. Their problem. We are working on it.
• 1. Not on consoles. The work (and expense) required is insane and we’re not EA but we have worked our peer to peer system massively to improve the experience.
  2. It depends on which wheel but we’ve rewritten the FFB and I suspect you’ll be very happy.
  3. Join in progress is a substantial area of work for us over the last 6 months so I’ll be very disappointed if it’s not greatly improved.
  4. We think so… There will always be edge cases and no sim in history is free of ‘physics explosions’ but we’ve worked very hard with our team and with our thousand of users at WMD on this area and I haven’t seen it occur for many months now.
• Yes we did. The main issue we saw with pCARS1 was that the AI were excessively eager to drive into you under braking and in corners. We’ve had coders full time on this for the last 2 years working on the ‘AI personalities’ to make them more human. We’ve also worked hard on the ‘sticking issue’ where when you contact an AI driver you seem to lose input and you merrily understeer off together. This should be fixed.
  With AI you will never create a perfect scenario in all conditions. They are not human after all. But what we have created is what we feel is a set of AI personalities that approach humanity without the downsides that we coded before.
• We’ve completely changed our audio. We’ve moved to the fmod rev based system with custom plugins. Therefore we’ve had to recreate all of our base audio input for pCARS2. We have a wonderful team that are working overtime now to transform all of our extant audio to the new system. I think it sounds massively better for those cars that have been converted thus far. It’s a case of polishing now. Those cars that are polished sound epic if I may say so
• We’ve massively reworked our pad input filters to try to pre-empt what the user wants to happen, in coordination with what actually happens in game. It’s been rewritten from scratch and we’ve been influenced a lot by what our competitors do here. What we want to happen is that we don’t need to build in subtle understeer for controllability to allow the average person to enjoy the experience on a game pad. I personally have put away my wheel for pCARS2. I’m using a pad exclusively and I’m insisting that we retain the dynamics of the car but allow the player to control such things as sharp front end turn in and on the apex and on-throttle balance with full throttle oversteer and opposite lock controllability (if that makes sense)… That was our aim 2 year ago and I think we’ve achieved it. I think it’s a very affirming experience for pad users now.
• We’re massively better on AMD cards now. Particularly on dual+ setups.
• You’re negating the influence of our new rebroadcasting code.
  We are shipping a dedicated server setup for PC and we’re using Sony and Microsoft systems for consoles.
• Yes. We’ve greatly improved the interpolation and we’re working with distant player throttling code. We’re also working with ghosting players who have a very bad connection, within limits, before they’re removed.
• The FFB is transformed in pCARS2 and we have a one click three option ‘feel’ system (as of now, this may change) to allow you to get the feel you want instantly. The FFB should not need to be tailored per car. It should reflect the nuanced differences of each car.

Official Webpage – www.projectcarsgame.com