Track Editor Improvements & Customizability
You have been officially involved in working on GeneRally since 2010. How has working on a new game changed since then?
Well, when I started working on GeneRally, it was mostly in a maintenance capacity. There was no talk of a “GeneRally 2” – or anything even remotely like that – at the start.Hannu (Räbinä - one of the original developers) contacted me and said “I’ve got this updated version of GR, but it needs more work. You were interested in taking this and running with it, so here you go.” Essentially, what he’d done was change a bunch of GR’s core system to use more modern libraries, that worked better on modern systems – but he was maybe 50% of the way through that process when he'd decided to stop.
Our intention was really to update the game to work better on more modern platforms, add a few long-overdue features (such as integrating palette-switching), and just try to breathe a little bit of new life into the game.
Our announcement of GeneRally 2 came from that same place, too – we wanted to add more features, but the things we wanted to do, the existing codebase couldn't easily support. We talked with Hannu, and he was on-board with the idea, and we went from there.
One of the core elements that made the first GeneRally so popular was the easy-to-use Track Editor. Could you give us some more insight into how the editor will be improved for GeneRally 2?
I don't think there's an area of the Track Editor that hasn’t seen an improvement. The biggest upgrade is moving from 2D to 3D – and all the benefits that brings with it: easier object placement and easier height-map painting being the major ones. We've added a bunch of time-saving tools, such as painting masks; a line-based object placement tool; and a brush-based object placement tool. You can also test-drive your tracks directly in the Track Editor, which is a massive change from GeneRally. Anyway, we’re not planning on stopping there - we've got more quality-of-life features planned.The map size in the track editor has grown a bit throughout development and reached a maximum size of 1024x1024 pixels by December 2022. Is this the size you are planning to keep, or are even bigger maps going to be possible?
Well, in response to feedback from the community, we've increased the land map size to 2048x2048 for the release. We think this helps to narrow the gap between the pixel-based terrains and the slightly smoother 3D art and gives track creators more to play with, too.The new track editor is vastly improved and features a bigger map size. Image Credit: Curious Chicken Games
As GeneRally 2 is set to feature elements like tire wear, fuel consumption and suspension physics. How difficult is it to toe the line between fun and implementation of realistic features like that?
Arguably this is the most difficult part of the equation for us – and specifically for Markku, who’s put a huge amount of work into the physics implementations. Our desire behind implementing a physics model based on reality was to have handling that was believable, varied and had a lot of depth to it. GeneRally’s physics, whilst far from anything you could call “simulation”, had a depth to them that didn't really exist in the arcade games of the time – or even in the arcade games of the present day.Markku had a strong interest in doing things “the physics way” and adding layers on top of that to lower the barrier-to-entry. As a result we have a physics simulation that is based on modelled realistic behaviours – with physics simulation parameters you’d be thrilled to find in a “sim-cade" title – but we also have something close to what I suppose you’d call “driving aids” that we can layer on top of each car individually to make it a little more manageable when driving with the keyboard or controller.
As a result, we can set up a believable set of car physics using the everything from spring rates to tyre pressures and differential type... and then we can dial it in for controller and keyboard play by adding things like traction control, auto-slide correction, etc. We’ve got some cars that rely more heavily on these features, and some that rely more heavily on the realistic aspects of the physics.
Customizability is probably the word that first comes to mind for most when talking about GeneRally. Are there going to be more integrated editors?
We’ll start with the Track Editor, as that was always GeneRally's "killer feature” - but we have a very open internal discussion about what we’ll do for other things (for example cars). As our team is quite small – and we want to prefer quality over quantity – it’s impossible for us to say at this stage what we will end up doing, but we talk about this topic on a regular basis.- Next page: Console Versions & VR?
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