PC1 Project CARS (pre-release thread)

Three months ago, Slightly Mad Studios’ Ian Bell shared his vision of a community-funded simulation title right here on VirtualR. What many may have dismissed as a very much utopianklar vision has gotten extremely real as the studio has been hard at work for the past few months to turn a great idea into a working project.

Named Community Assisted Race Sim, or C.A.R.S. for short, the project will allow ordinary sim racers to become investors in a racing simulation title and get a share of the profits and unmatched access to the development process and a say in the title’s direction.
For the past few months, the guys at Slightly Mad Studios have been hard at work on all fronts as Ian Bell has revealed some exclusive details on the team’s progress. The legal work on the project has just been completed and SMS is ready to launch the project’s website and accept investors within the next 2-3 weeks.

The studio will be offering investment options that will fit any budged, starting out with a 5€ option ending with gold-level commitment of 1000€ and beyond. All investors will be getting access to downloadable development builds throughout the development process, the level of investment will determine the amount of influence each member has though.

While every investor will get to vote on the direction the new title will take, gold members get to participate in board meetings where the bigger calls will be made, always considering the requests from the regular investors. Gold members will even get source-code access to the simulation while smaller investors will be given script access to play with.

Slightly Mad Studios promise a completely transparent development process as all investors get to follow every single bit of progress and every single discussion the developers will be having. The SMS team will work out in the open for all investors to see, there will be no closed-off development forum as all investors get to follow everything the development team does, “even the arguments,” as Ian Bell points out.

C.A.R.S will be used the stripped-down Shift 2 Unleashed engine as starting point, as the team will be adding new modules to it during the course of the development process, including a new DirectX 11 renderer, a new physics engine and new AI. Slightly Mad Studios expect a development cycle of at least 12 months until the finished product is ready, however all investors will be getting access to development builds throughout the process to keep everyone entertained.

Below is a first high-resolution preview, showing an immensely-detailed historical Lotus Formula One car in the garage. SMS is planning to release the first build shortly after the first investors joined, the first release will include a handful of cars and tracks to try out. The base content won’t be too advanced though as the investors will have the final say in the direction that the title will take and what content will be included.

SMS is planning to have fully-licensed content in the finished product, the team may be dealing with generic content in the development builds though while the licensing is being finalised in the background.
For years now, sim racers have been bemoaning the publishers lack of interest in sim racing and the missing influence on developing titles. It looks like Slightly Mad Studios will be changing all that with C.A.R.S.

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Link to VirtualR article
 
"Slightly Mad" is right! This could go any number of ways. I know similar things have been tried before with sports teams, and they've gone OK at best (I don't have intimate knowledge of any, but haven't heard of any great success)
 
Most of the time that studios have tried this they were first time developers trying to develop very ambitious indie games, but with SMS's track record of actually completing two very complete and polished games I would hope that they'll see bigger investments thrown their way. I'm actually incredibly interested, especially if they add in any rally (like RBR not dirt)
 
bahahahahaahaha

So this time they'll do what???

A proper PC MP...
Permanent individual laptime records...
Eliminate swaying in random vehicles...
Launch input lag free

AS IF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

They're only doing what the community as a whole is asking for. Ian Bell's already said that he's listened to what people want and he's taking it into consideration...if you want something, lobby for it, and if enough people want it, with any luck, it'll be implemented into the game.
 
LOL, which community?.....hardcore simmers or the arcade brigade?
Is this a PC only game, or a multi-platform?....if it's multi-platform then the PC version will be compromised because of that fact, unless a PC specific version is built, of course this assumes that there's enough money to warrant separate functioning games.

Please, no more of this console ****, heck even the great GT5 has all sorts of issues with many steering wheels, and that's the world's most popular racing game and would probably be the number one selling game of it's release year if it wasn't for COD4/5/6 etc.
 
I am a bit skeptical at first sight to be honest but would be nice to hear a little bit more information from SMS about this first before drawing a conclusion. Or is this game not for all the simracing communities?
 
This game will be developed for PC and ported for consoles. PC only is not possible for a company the size of SMS. But it doesn't mean it can't be a sim. All sims with aids are a bit arcade (even iRacing will soon have aids for beginner races). If the game is good, sim or not, it will sell on consoles.
 
PC only is not possible for a company the size of SMS. But it doesn't mean it can't be a sim.

You may be right in this case, but that's not the point i'm worried about. I'm on Davids side of argumentation. The key element in the building process will be that the community wishes have a big influence on the final product. In other words: The majority decides. We all know, that we (hardcore sim fans) are a minority. So it depends on which kind of community they'd ask.

But thinking twice, I read this again:

"The studio will be offering investment options that will fit any budged, starting out with a 5€ option ending with gold-level commitment of 1000€ and beyond. All investors will be getting access to downloadable development builds throughout the development process, the level of investment will determine the amount of influence each member has though.

While every investor will get to vote on the direction the new title will take, gold members get to participate in board meetings where the bigger calls will be made, always considering the requests from the regular investors. Gold members will even get source-code access to the simulation while smaller investors will be given script access to play with."

Now one improtant question grows in my mind: "Which kind of gamer wants to pay for a gold membership, to eventually make the game become as much as he would like it?"
I don't want to offend the arcade gamers with my following guess but if my interpretation is right, I think the sim racers will pay more money for a title which suits their likings. I don't say that sim racers have more money but I guess they'd have more willingness to pay more money for a real sim, whilest arcade gamers would move on to another good game.

At least this is my hope...
 
Now one improtant question grows in my mind: "Which kind of gamer wants to pay for a gold membership, to eventually make the game become as much as he would like it?"
I don't want to offend the arcade gamers with my following guess but if my interpretation is right, I think the sim racers will pay more money for a title which suits their likings. I don't say that sim racers have more money but I guess they'd have more willingness to pay more money for a real sim, whilest arcade gamers would move on to another good game.

I agree with that. :)
 
There is a huge thread over at NoGrip in which a lot of the whats and hows have been and are being discussed and explained by Ian Bell of SMS. The game will be developed on PC in full DX11 and then back-ported to DX9 and consoles. It will be a free-to-play base game with paid extra content ('microtransactions'), the content and approach of the game will be decided by the investors although SMS have strong ideas about its initial direction (=full sim with many options and assists to make it suited for arcade racers). Investors will have access to weekly or monthly builds of the game for testing, bug reporting and modding/experimenting.
 
Since most games go wrong in one way or another due to publisher deadlines and profit targets rather than caring for the game's content and the game player, doing transparent community-aided/-funded development has more pros than cons IMO as far as the game's quality, feel and stability are concerned.
 

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