Racecraft

Alex Franchini · Jul 9, 2015

Italian dev team Vae Victis has officially announced Racecraft, a VR-ready racing title.

Racecraft is a racing title based on procedurally generated tracks and VR support from the developers of Victory: The Age of Racing.

Click here to watch the official announcement trailer for Racecraft on our RaceTube!

The title is built around the studio's proprietary procedural generation engine, named Camilla, and is being marketed as a "sandbox racing game". Apparently Racecraft will also natively support Oculus Rift and will have a "hands-free VR interface". There will be car customization involved too, though it's not clear yet what kind of car classes will be available besides the F1-like model in the preview image.

Judging from the trailer, it does look interesting, even though the gameplay bits are taken from an older, scrapped version of the game. The studio believes that "e-sports and e-racing" now have a chance to "part from brands and real circuits" and begin their own new life - while I'm not entirely sure that's going to happen, I'd love to see an attempt at creating something more original.

Stay tuned, because we will be checking out Racecraft at this year's Gamescom (in August) and have a chat with the studio in a couple of months.

Brian Duddy · Jul 13, 2015

I liked Victory, but they made some weird decisions, and clearly lost interest a couple months after release. Hopefully they can keep up development on this...

Sk3ptik0n · Jul 13, 2015

I always thought that procedurally generated tracks would be a great idea for a rally game. By its nature, a rally game takes away one of the most important parts of the sport when the player memorize the track. Creating new versions of the stage procedurally would maintain the freshness of the experience.

Now, in regard to this game, I am not very excited. I was never a fan of fantasy tracks. A game with all fantasy tracks is not interesting to me.

Rivvern · Jul 13, 2015

Sk3ptik0n said:
I always thought that procedurally generated tracks would be a great idea for a rally game. By its nature, a rally game takes away one of the most important parts of the sport when the player memorize the track. Creating new versions of the stage procedurally would maintain the freshness of the experience.

Now, in regard to this game, I am not very excited. I was never a fan of fantasy tracks. A game with all fantasy tracks is not interesting to me.

Agree. I dont want to race generated tracks. I mostly want to race real world tracks and sometimes fictional if its really good. And as you said. If this had been a rally game, it would have been different. With a good physics model it might have been a great rally sim.

TzZyO · Jul 13, 2015

Sk3ptik0n said:
I always thought that procedurally generated tracks would be a great idea for a rally game. By its nature, a rally game takes away one of the most important parts of the sport when the player memorize the track. Creating new versions of the stage procedurally would maintain the freshness of the experience.

Now, in regard to this game, I am not very excited. I was never a fan of fantasy tracks. A game with all fantasy tracks is not interesting to me.

Procedurally generated rally stages? One of the best ideas I heard in relation to sim-racing. Codies should take note (most of the Dirt Rally stages look generated anyway). No wonder the word procedurally itself contains the name of the sport

I would suggest, however, generating them from some kind of a seed (a word, a number, whatever).

Richard Eriksson · Jul 13, 2015

If i read between the lines i interpret it as a challenger for non-sim titles, and a move to esports (i hate that term). So the first thing that comes to mind is TrackMania...

daww · Jul 13, 2015

Procedurally generated rally stages would require the pace notes to be generated in the same way too. I believe in the pace notes in Dirt Rally are still manually made, I doubt that they could match the quality of the current pace notes.

That said: procedurally generated hillclimb courses + daily seeded run = awesome

TzZyO · Jul 13, 2015

daww said:
Procedurally generated rally stages would require the pace notes to be generated in the same way too. I believe in the pace notes in Dirt Rally are still manually made, I doubt that they could match the quality of the current pace notes.

That said: procedurally generated hillclimb courses + daily seeded run = awesome

If the bends and straights of the course get parametrized, this makes deriving the resulting pace notes a pretty straightforward task. Not that they are perfect in, say, RBR... And making them like this would produce more consistency.
Anyway, generating hillclimb courses is also good

Judging by the video, though, it doesn't look like this particular implementation of the concept is any good for this task.

Kevin Knorpp · Jul 13, 2015

For me, sim racing already stands on its own and I don't have any ties to IRL whatsoever. I drive the best combos for sim racing. Period. Regarding "raceability" I believe fictional tracks can be every bit as raceable as IRL tracks but not sure how procedural tracks will/would accomplish this. Having said that, I rarely encounter a combo that is not raceable, especially in high-power historic vehicles.

ouvert · Jul 13, 2015

I can imagine that as fast arcade mulitplayer have fun with friends mario kart/trackmania style game

Snjper · Jul 13, 2015

Almost looks like a reskinned Motorsport Revolution ... eeek

John Peat · Jul 14, 2015

Grid2 has tracks which change as you drive around them - I HATE driving those - proc. gen. MIGHT work for a rally-style game but no circuit racer is interested in 'guessing what corner is coming next' surely?

Victory had promise but they did very, very little with it sadly - this seems like a worse idea from the start but who knows?

P*Funk · Jul 14, 2015

daww said:
Procedurally generated rally stages would require the pace notes to be generated in the same way too. I believe in the pace notes in Dirt Rally are still manually made, I doubt that they could match the quality of the current pace notes.

Well any procedurally generated map would inevitably have the components present to tie into auto generated pace notes. If the generation comes up with tying specific corner parts to other parts, and those parts that are generated are notated as being a left 6, t junction, even with things like deceptive what have you then it could sure be done.

Ultimately, what good are perfect pace notes if you're always going to end up memorizing the stage within a few months anyway?

TzZyO · Jul 14, 2015

Alternatively, the generating engine could start with the pace notes first, followed by building up the course off of them with a certain amount of randomization involved.
If one starts with generating the terrain firsthand, it can get more complicated though. On the other hand, roads are built using a certain logic, so it's not necessary to make this totally random.

P*Funk · Jul 14, 2015

I would be highly impressed if this title is actual proper randomization. Most procedural generation is based on some core components. So I imagine it'll be like the computer picking random pieces of lego to put together, or like the pieces for a model railroad. There'll probably be a number of different dressings for the same exact road piece so that you can drive the same corner but it'll look unique, and so on.

budlix · Jul 14, 2015

I though master your skills, car and track and mix it in to winning cocktail is the essence of racing. But now you can master only skill and car. Anyway - great idea for offroad racing like Baja or Truck trial maybe

I will keep prefering classic circuits for my race cars.

Matthew327 · Jul 14, 2015

I think Racecraft does have a lot of potential in terms of being a fun racer to spend an hour per day just trying to create awesome cars and race them on different tracks. From what I've seen so far, it looks rather promising (and if they include the block building system for cars they used in Victory, the cars are going to be awesome).

VaeVictisGames · Jul 16, 2015

Hello guys,
we're really happy to see your interest in our new project.
Follow us on our Facebook page and on our Dev Blog
to receive answers for most of your inquiries.

John Peat · Jul 16, 2015

Heads-up - I got an email today which said that anyone who owns Victory (their current racer) will get this new game for free (normal if you have normal - deluxe if you have that or the DLC version)

That's kinda cool - as they're retiring the older game and all - so if you picked-it up, you have a new game coming too!

Spinelli · Jul 17, 2015

Kevin Knorpp said:
For me, sim racing already stands on its own and I don't have any ties to IRL whatsoever. I drive the best combos for sim racing. Period. Regarding "raceability" I believe fictional tracks can be every bit as raceable as IRL tracks but not sure how procedural tracks will/would accomplish this. Having said that, I rarely encounter a combo that is not raceable, especially in high-power historic vehicles.

Exactly, a track is a track is a track. Would Suzuka or Spa magically just suck if they didn't happen to exist in real life? Of course not. Would a bad fantasy track all of a sudden become amazing just because it happened to be built in real life? Of course not.

A track is a track is a track regardless if a version of it happens to be built on planet Earth or not.

If the track layout changes as you drive it, then that's obviously a completely different story, lol. That could be hella fun with some friends online in an arcade game though, lol.