Well kind of......

I am sure you have heard of all those different several companies that are planning to do the "real time racing" thing against real racing drivers in our sims.

Well, the BBC have got a clip to show how the company "Real Time Race" are developing this new system and have got some shots of the cars driving around the track on a 360.

Now the thing that really blew my mind was the graphics. Its real.... I am not joking.....

Check out the video

Sure, the finished product might have to be "dumbed down" a bit to match the looks with the car so it doesnt stand out so much, but what they are showing right now is mind boggling.

Edit - Yes. I know the video is about real time racing. And I know this has been discussed before already a lot of times. But ignore it for the second. I just want to show the graphic side of it.

With GT5 and F3 fighting over who has better looks/graphics, this will take the cookie any day. (Presuming the finished product looks something like the one in the video and is not dumbed down completely)

This is about the 5th time this has come up here.

Personally I don't like it, I play games to escape reality, but thats just my opinion, before you scream at me.

That video also made me lose the game so many times.

I know that real time racing thing has come up here millions of times.

What I wanted to show tho is the graphics and what is possible.....

Funny thing about this particular video is that they claim it's running on a standard 360, but it's really a WinXP box with the 360 controller.

I'm not really into competeting with the real drivers, it's you against them but they're not really competing with you, takes away the fun.

Console version? Do not want.

Can be interesting. However, they have some work to do to get the "feel" there. As you see it's not specially nice when turning. Also I guess spinning will cause pretty much.. well not eyecandy.

...and just imagine the costs to the 'users'?

~€500 per season???

Isn't Iracing more expensive?
Joking. (still expensive).

Yeah. There is still a lot of work to do regarding the physics and how the car handles. (Judging from the video)

The question will be what resolution these graphics will have. This video footage was first a little stuttering and second not really high definition. So its hard to guess how good it really looks. But it definitely is an interesting and sophisticated idea. How they good the funding? They are already working 4 years on this...

The technology seems bizarre to me, a combination of laser scanning and live video footage? One thing I noticed was the sunlight (specular highlight) reflecting off the ground- a completely dynamic effect which changes depending on viewing angle. I have no idea how these details could be processed in the engine like that. It just seems crazy that what they're talking about could possibly work at all.

Using videoed footage, no matter how sophisticated the method might me, seems to be the lame way for me.
I don’t believe in a future of virtual reality that consists of dead pictures captured at some given point. To me computer generated graphics that have the ability to adapt real-time is the way to go.

Getting back to that thing that is promoted as a “new technology” It just looks like a 3d environment generated by the already know laser scanning method, the only difference being that it uses real photos for environment-object textures…

Real-time generated physics are way harder to get right. What is shown in that video isn't really promising at this aspect.

This somehow reminded me on the game Cyclemania - PC Game (1994).

It's an interesting way of doing it, I'll grant them. Essentially the track is made up from voxels produced by the laser-scan, and each voxel's colour is changed according to how far round the track you are, taken from the 360 degree video recording.

Think of this picture: http://www.lfs.net/page_images/screenshots/ROK_lsd_2.jpg but instead of a single position of the laser-scanner (or at least a small number of discrete scans) and single set of colour values for the points, the points are scanned at regular intervals round the track and it uses whichever set you are nearest, with colour values taken from the appropriate frame of the video.

Cool technology for making racing sims.

Terrible game idea. Who wants to play a game with a bunch of drivers who are oblivious to you? how would launching overtaking moves go? They'd just crash into you following their normal racing line. That is the stupidest racing game game feature i have heard of since rewind...no never mind. this takes it hands down.

Quote from Electrik Kar :

I have no idea how these details could be processed in the engine like that.

The scene will be effectively be textured using the cubemap-frame from the recorded video that is closest to the point in space you're currently at in the simulation. View dependent effects like specular highlights (or "reflections" as they're called in the real world. ) will as such have been recorded in the video and be displayed semi-correctly as you move about.

So does it basically just work like google street view, except with laser scanning to determine depth?

doesn't look particulary special? Those "reflections" are just what they see from their camera at that time, it's just a big piece of unrepeated texture.

Name might get confusing... There's been a RealTime Racing in the SPEED World Challenge Touring Car series for as long as I can remember

Quote from 510N3D :

This somehow reminded me on the game Cyclemania - PC Game (1994).

Yeah, when seeing that video there are some great similarities.
Hopefully it will be done better this time

Quote from wheel4hummer :

So does it basically just work like google street view, except with laser scanning to determine depth?

Pretty much, yeah.

I really don't see the point of this thing. No one would ever let a real racer to aganist someone who is sitting at home on their couch. Even if they can get it 100% accurate, it is just not fair for the real racer. The feeling you get in a real race car is something that you can never get infront of your TV.

IMHO this is a stupid idea. Ambitous, but rubbish.

Quote from NSX_FReeDoM :

Ambitous, but rubbish.

From a technology point of view, it's fantastic (I *love* the technique for displaying the track), and I can see that the casual Forza or Gran Turismo player would lap it up, but for anyone who wants to actually race properly it won't be enough - it's just hotlapping against a ghost car.

Stuff like this is the future because as graphics get more and more advanced, it gets harder and harder to model well by hand. We already have large games using real pictures as textures to save time, like Oblivion (which looks great), and movies are now using laser scans of clay models to build 3d meshes. One photographic "megatexture" (ie, Id's Tech 5 Engine and Rage) isn't so out there.

Racing against real drivers is silly though. We're not at that point yet. The physics aren't that good. The virtual car would most certainly differ from the real one in many ways.

Stuff *like* this yes. This exact technique only really works for a racing game where you follow a very specific route through the landscape (I know it does adjust for your position on the track, but that will only work so far before things start to look a little screwy) and are generally quite far away from any details - it wouldn't work so well for an FPS, or something like Oblivion, for example, where you could be *anywhere* on the landscape (where a rolling video to make the textures wouldn't work) and also walk up to objects and scrutinise them closely. And of course, you wouldn't be able to represent a fictional location like this.

Also, there's no way of automatically adding material attributes like reflection and specularity - they'd have to be added by hand, and also removed from the film footage by hand.. The refecting road surface may work for the particular camera position where the video was taken, but as you move your viewpoint about the fact that the refelections are 'baked' into the texture will look odd.

It's all good though, I'm not saying *none* of the technique could be carried over to other kinds of game.