The Big Assetto Corsa Competizione Interview (Part 2)

[Paul Jeffrey]

Catch part two of our exclusive Assetto Corsa Competizione interview with Marco Massarutto and Ste'fano Casillo of Kunos Simulazioni...

Causing a mass panic of excitement from the sim racing community following the announcement back on February 21st, it is probably fair to say plenty of people are excited for the upcoming Assetto Corsa Competizione racing simulation, and with a potential Early Access release coming to Steam this summer, we answered the community call and sat down with two of the men behind the simulation - Marco Massarutto and Stefano Casillo, founding members of Italian development studio Kunos Simulazioni.

If you are interested in learning more of about the official racing simulation of the Blancpain GT Series, check out part 2 of our exclusive interview at the head of this article.

If you missed it earlier, part one can be viewed HERE. Oh and please consider doing us a favour by subscribing to our YouTube channel if you enjoyed this coverage and are looking forward to more of the same in the years ahead...


Assetto Corsa Competizione should be available on Steam Early Access Summer 2018.

Check out the Assetto Corsa Competizione here at RaceDepartment for the latest news and discussions regarding this exciting upcoming sim. We intend to host some quality League and Club Racing events as well as hosting some great community created mods (we hope!). Join in the discussion today.

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Enjoy the interview? Looking forward to ACC? Learn anything new? Leave a comment below (and subscribe to our YouTube page too!)

 

[Koen Verlinde]

> Mid save race will be there (Stefano confirmed that)

YES! Finally.

Now, I hope they can overcome their original 30 car limit. I'll upgrade my PC if necessary for this, I really would.

 

[Daggerman]

I’d rather not have a hard limit for the number of cars in both MP and with AI. 30 cars isn’t bad, but I’d rather see a number more like 50.

A fairly recent game let you run as many cars as you like (I think it was GTR2), however the more cars you added, a warning appeared on screen regarding PC system resources. Can’t something similar be done here?

 

[Helmut Skrdla]

Sorry, but I must say: I hate when people bring up the AI subject!! Gzus Christ, in the internet era, where multiplayer is the key point of particularly every single new game that comes out, and specially in a simulation environment, AI is totally dispensable!!!

And I hate it when some people think that their personal preferences must be valid for everyone else on the planet.

I have no time or patience to organize myself in some online community racing efforts, I want to race on the track, with the car and the settings at anytime I chose.

It's actually cool to hear (didn't think of that) that the fixed car/track set will allow them to implement a different AI approach. Also nice to hear Stefano likes CM F1 for the gameplay features, because for sure Codemasters did a lot right with that aspect of that game.

Also awesome to hear that offline saves are in, and the consideration given to accelerated AI teammates (I've been saying for years I want an endurance sim doing that). This might make it THE endurance sim benchmark.

All in all, thanks to Paul for the interview and to Stefano and Marco for their openess and "down to earthness" in really giving us insight into their considerations..

 

[Koen Verlinde]

I’d rather not have a hard limit for the number of cars in both MP and with AI. 30 cars isn’t bad, but I’d rather see a number more like 50.

A fairly recent game let you run as many cars as you like (I think it was GTR2), however the more cars you added, a warning appeared on screen regarding PC system resources. Can’t something similar be done here?

GTR2 did have that yes. However, I think they're playing with this 30 limit to not offset people with older systems. Doesn't mean it won't be possible, but it sounds a lot better than saying "we're going to have the full grid but you'll need an i7 of the latest generation". They were pretty vague about the upper limit anyway.

 

[James Beam]

Any mention of the competition format for multiplayer?

 

[MarcG]

Not watched Part 2 yet but from reading the comments here I'm even more hyped for ACC, Save Games oh Yes this is good as I've used the RF2 Feature a lot over the years so that's very handy to have.

AI is important to me (like others have already posted reasons for I'm in a similar boat) and I'm excited to see what Stefano can cook up in this area especially as he only has a handful of cars & tracks to worry about.

As for the 30 car limit there is no reason why this couldn't be raised in the future, remember that ACC is the next AC so it will gradually improve/expand etc so there's always hope that more cars per race could be added further down the line. After all the first release will be into Early Access (Beta to us oldies!) so I'm kind of seeing Kunos not getting carried away with too much before it comes out of EA, they're still learning the Unreal Engine and will continue to do sofor as long as they use it, so anything is still possible in the future.

 

[Tberg]

I'm not having loads of time either, but I still prefer mp over AI, simply because of the psychological factor. Even racing one equally skilled driver makes up the experience for me over an AI grid, regardless if the AI is beatable or not.
But, after watching the interview, I'm exited to see what the team comes up with. To race in a complete series finally, with all the rules and settings, and of cause with Stefano+new guy's focused work on the AI, I could be tempted to try a season in sp. Just like in the old days before mp leagueracing completely stole my attention over sp. The sense of completing a season and still having a full grid at the end (which rarely happens now a day in mp) is compelling

 

[Raig Strehlow]

thanks for this great Interview

limit of cars: on MP there shouldn't be a problem, since the KI/AI isnt used there, me thinking. The physics of the other cars arent calculated online, just send from the server to my client or? So if we could hide some cars on MP, the actual hardware should be fast enough to handle it.

It's okay in my mind, when we have just 30 cars on SP, but online i would like to have the option drive with more guys.

Nice to hear how they watched another racing games to see what's worked well or not. I hope they can reach their goals, since that's what we want.

 

[LeSunTzu]

Great interview. I just hope that meeting tight deadlines won't force KS to release a game that is not fully debugged. Too many games have suffered from that lately.

 

[Ernie]

I understand this problem with the CPU-demanding AI on player physics. But wouldn't it be possible to limit singeleplayer races against AI to 30 max, but allow more cars in Multiplayer, because you need no AI calculations?

 

[antonn]

Many thanks to Paul Jeffrey, Stephano Casillo and Marco Massarutto for this very good news.

 

[davewilliams000]

I'm a little disappointed with only being able to have a maximum of 30 cars on track, was really hoping to run 60 car grids at Spa like back in the days of GTR2, and also i guess this mean we won't be getting the correct cars at the correct rounds to really simulate the season.

I have very little knowledge of programming etc, but could the car limit not be overcome by adding in a max visible car limit?

GTR2 did have that yes. However, I think they're playing with this 30 limit to not offset people with older systems. Doesn't mean it won't be possible, but it sounds a lot better than saying "we're going to have the full grid but you'll need an i7 of the latest generation". They were pretty vague about the upper limit anyway.

Yes I think that's exactly what they are saying. Sounds like they are aiming for 30 to be usable on (for want of a better term) an average system. I like that they use full physics for AI cars, as it does make it more realistic, especially as they only are having to simulate a certain type of cars this time so they will be able to tune the AI to those cars/tires as they said.

@Paul Jeffrey, very nice job with the interview! I suggest you do one of these everyday until the Early Access comes out, just to make the wait a bit more bearable

I don't think you can interview the Kunos guys every day though, as then they'd never get any work done and we'll never get the game!

 

[Pepper606]

Sorry, but I must say: I hate when people bring up the AI subject!! Gzus Christ, in the internet era, where multiplayer is the key point of particularly every single new game that comes out, and specially in a simulation environment, AI is totally dispensable!!!

I have 677 hours in Assetto Corsa and play all the others too, I have NEVER had an online race.
If there is no AI then people like me will simply not be interested.
As for the random failures, I agree that there should be an element that is as a result of player action (kerb abuse etc) but it should be fixable and with some kind of warning/indicator so you get some idea you're going to be in trouble soon if you carry on.

 

[mantasisg]

Begin learning TODAY

 

[DM2zzion]

Great interview, sound very promising and those guys answer questions really honest.

I'm not a fan of limiting the amount of cars to 30 by restricting pit boxes either. AC1 officially supports 24 AI's, yet on my machine with a not too bad CPU I can race 60 AI's flawlessly. Furthermore as other people already said, the CPU load is way lower in multiplayer. I'm taking part in a VLN league in AC1 where we have 60 participants on track at once and I never had a single performance issue.

 

[schnipp]

There is also the limitation in space for the pit and grid boxes.

There are OSRW mods for the official AC tracks that allow more than the stock no. of pit/grid boxes and I've run up to 40 cars in SP on my Ryzen 5, it ran quite well at least for 60fps, just the race starts were dipping down in framerate a bit. Just started a track day session with 34 AI cars and my 3,6GHz R5 hexacore is around 85% Main_T usage at the start and went to 70% while all AI cars left the pits.

But if you have a look at that you see how 'stacked' the pit lane is.

In real racing teams share pit boxes, but maybe as a game there need to be more factors to be considered.
It worked for the OSRW mods cause cars didn't share the actual same pit box, but more pit boxes were added beside the original ones.



This is how it's done on the OSRW mod, but that isn't realistic.
We ran the old Goodwood track by Thiago Lima a while ago online, the server crashed with the full grid because cars 19 and 20 were placed on the same pit boxes as cars 1 +2, so I had to limit the server to 18 cars to work.
So there would be a need to add sharing of pit boxes for ACC for it to work and have more than 30 cars online.

But also KS has to make sure everything works withouth issues, so maybe sharing grid boxes might just be a 'hack' solution that probably is a bad idea.

 

[BernL]

With 1485 hours on AC ,my only beef with AC was the spin out physics and how a car behaves when push way to mush and put it into the fencing or guardrail. Its a fact of life....you race enough , at some point you will guardrail .

 

[schnipp]

One more point of using more cars online.

If you start the server manager for AC and set it to 24 clients you get an estimate of 3.82Mbit/s upload bandwidth, pushing this to 30 cars pushes it to 6Mbit/s, so the increase isn't linear, but rather more squared function.
So more than 30 cars would increase the necessary bandwidth quite a lot, while it probably already has to increase for possible dynamic track and weather data.

 

[MarkR]

yes that's also totally a possibility.
Drive your stint, stop, save the game.. send the save file to your friend, he'll pick it up and to his stint then send a new save state to you.
This could be a very interesting and fun new scenario to race against the AI.

Will it take 3 months for your friend to receive the new save file as it does when Kunos send new files to Sony and Microsoft? Or will the game delete all career, race progress and setups after each update as it does with console version of AC?

All this sounds good on PC and as a balance to most people being so positive about what might be I hope this game never reaches console. After a year of development AC on consoles still performs terribly and has features and content missing despite promises of parity.

You both snigger at the competition but at least their games work and are feature complete on the consoles too.

Despite the console debacle, I do genuinely wish you all every success with ACC on PC.

 

[schnipp]

Apples and oranges...

AC's engine was not designed to be used on consoles later, so there needed to be so many adjustments for it to even work on console.

With a complete new design it might just be easier to bring it to console and with less problems.


And just my 2 cents:
I think console users don't need to moan too much about the port since pc gamers for many years now got a lot of crappy pc ports from games that were designed for console, yet do you hear us complaining all the time?