Congrats Bob. Pity that carshock has closed down opposite your office, otherwise you could have gone and bought yourself a dodgy* motor with your first paycheque in your lunch break.
Make sure to get heaps of chocolate or other anti-frustration drugs to keep yourself from pulling your hair out when you have to simplify your vehicle physics again, and again, and again until nothing more than a driving-aid-masked pile of pseudo physics remains.
Actually from the chat I had, most of their physics seems to try to be fairly realistic, there's just a bit of fudging to the tyre data and loads of intrepetation of analogue gamepad controllers that is essentially a massive driving aid, thus the games end up easier to drive with a gamepad than a wheel. For example, the force feedback induced automatic countersteer happens if you just let go of the pad, rather than having the wheel locked straight. Loads of interesting stuff I've picked up already and I don't start for 10 days or so.
Now I'm going to sleep off beer and try and get some of the high frequencies back in my hearing. Oh how I hate places that deafen you with music. And meagre dance/pop at that. Ahh, Nightwish to the rescue....
The gaming industry still thinks realism is bad, partly because of their mis interpretation of realism (tire curves that plumet; Test Drive Unlimited would actually be ok in ''hardcore'' mode otherwise).. Perhaps you can help make things drivable and sort of realistic as well..
Don't you think you'll be torn up between your desire for realism and the boss's desire to sell a quick arcade job?
Sounds like a typical night out in England. There aren't any really good clubs to go to which play the music at a reasonable level and its actually music that has some taste.
Depends on the game I suppose. If it's something like that cartoon racer they did, then the aim isn't realism anyway and there's no conflict there. If it's one of their semi-sims, then so long as it isn't too CPU intensive and is still driveable on a gamepad (mostly console market) then there should be a fair degree of freedom and room for improvement. Fixing slip angle curves should actually make it easier to drive, so I can't see there being a problem with that, once I can convince my boss anyway. They have had data from tyre manufacturers but apprantely it's not complete enough to be that useful as so much has to be guessed.
Heh, I only went to bars and my ears still ache (not my choice of venues, sadly). And I was home before midnight! We really are leading the forefront of a new generation of grumpy old youths.
Strangely (and oddly sort of on-topic too) it's always been one of my ambitions to make game music ever since I heard the Joe Satriani tracks for the original F1 on the PS1
But then I'm more of a musician/gamer than I am a geek/gamer, so I guess I don't really count
Thanks to everyone who has offered their congratulations.
The salary is actually quite poor, but given my experience I can't argue. I would be happy to organise another meet though, hopefully with less polls next time around. Actually I did contact a karting company about renting them out for the day but they never got back to me. It's the wrong time of year to start planning something now, perhaps in the new year I'll look into it again for next spring.