First a little background. Simbin were the developers of many different hardcore PC racing sims. After the development of GTLegends the developers split from simbin to form 'Blimey' games. At which point they signed with 10tacle to finish GTLegends and begin working on GTR2, of which they did about 99% of the development. Fast forward a little big, blimey and 10tacle got in soem financial trouble. Money that was expected didn't come, and some deals didn't sign, so blimey dissolved. So then, Slightly Mad Studios was formed from the same team.
Now onto the game:
First the engine: "The tech for Shift is built from the ground up and has never been seen before in any game. It is totally Unique and Ground breaking"
"Heres the thing, we have something new here. We have it because of the effort that has been put into the physics engine. Until this point, sim equaled hard, arcade equaled easy on the handling. The team felt this was more of a case of the realistic games not handling properly as opposed to sims being hard. I drove Forza and Gran Turismo and real cars don't handle like that. Real cars don't skid at 30mph and keep skidding at speed. Tyres when interacting with asphault grip/slipslide/slip/regrip and so forth, and with driver input are very controllable. This goes especially with race cars with slicks. Not only have sims not been compensative for the lack of g forces etc but theyve been making the cars spin out too easily. If any pit crew gave a real race car driver a car like that they would take it right back and tell them to fix it"
"When the team were at blimey! they did probably more than 99% of the development on GTR2. GTR2 was too hard, because the physics engine was lacking in some areas, wasn't measuring enough parameters quickly enough and in the correct way. Real cars are easy to drive slow and fast... Take any car on the track with some cheap slicks and you can abuse it to hell and back, slide all over the place, but under steering and throttle control. You need a skid pan to induce the leery spins you see in some of the so called realistic racing games. You'll see what I mean when you play SHIFT. It's a generation ahead in this area."
"We have a default mode thats ace for most players. The masses that enjoy PGR/GT5p etc. The novice mode for beginners. We also have a pro mode for the more hardcore guys. We're running a more complex physics engine than anything else on the market. No physics engine runs faster or reads at much.... 420hz, as of now, but if we find higher gives an advantage we might raise it and visa versa.
So what do you think of NFS SHift now?
http://www.autosimsport.net/index2/index.php/online-article-list/169-assmag-vol5-iss1
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