Slightly ISSUE 1 | VOLUME 1 | YEAR 2018 MAD W rld NIC HAMILTON LIKES THE “THE STIG” BEN COLLINS HAS KEEPING SANE WHILE WORKING HOW WE ENGINEER VIRTUAL ODDS―BECAUSE HE KEEPS SEEN THE FUTURE—VIRTUAL FROM HOME―AVOIDING THE CARS DOWN TO THE VERY NUTS BEATING THEM ... Page 1 REALITY ... Page 1 PITFALLS ... Page 2 AND BOLTS ... Page 2 NIC HAMILTON ON THE EX ‘STIG’ BEN COLLINS RACING LEWIS, RACING HIMSELF, HAS SEEN THE FUTURE AND RACING CLIOS From racing Lewis on sims As “Ready Player One” recently demonstrated, sim racing is the (was Nic faster?) to carving gateway to Virtual Reality. In the movie, the players sped through out a career in motorsport, beating the odds is what Nic a world populated by scarier curves than the Monaco Grand Hamilton’s been doing since Prix while dodging a giant Donkey Kong who was trying the day he was diagnosed with to pulverize them. I grew up playing Pac Man and Eye cerebral palsy. Now racing in Spy … the hyper-competitive world of Renault Clios in the UK, Nic looks back to the future… Spielberg’s futuristic vision of VR is already here. The Games READ ON Industry, led by a few notable visionaries, has spurred in- novation on to an unprecedented level. Who would have imagined that a graphics card company, Nvidia, would pioneer the Artifcial Intelligence inside the robots that will be driving the cars of the future. Or that games would become so vivid that they would evolve into professional sports. I became addicted to speed at an early age when I convinced my Dad and my cousin to push my ped- al kart until they were sprinting, and then let go. After that anything with a steering wheel was fair game in my view. READ ON Slightly Mad Studios has teamed up with US-Korean developers Project CARS GO is Go GAMEVIL to bring the Project CARS franchise to mobile devices. The game will be called Project CARS GO. “Alongside GAMEVIL, Project CARS GO puts players in the driver’s seat to experience the adrenaline pumping racing game in a whole new way,” said Ian Bell, CEO of Slightly Mad Studios. “The racing genre has a large, dedicated fan base, who are going to be 1 stomping the gas pedal and burning rubber very soon.” RENAULT BRINGS How to eSports TO Pay it Forward PROJECT CARS 2 cyber- Slightly Mad Studios backs 10-year-old Mil- la Sjorstrand’s racing dreams as she follows engineer in the heavy bootsteps of many Swedish race cars aces that have come through the self-same school of hard-knocks So Milla, how did a 10-year- What does sponsorship old racer get into motor mean for your racing ca- racing and how? reer? Project CARS 2 has been I drove rental karts when I was It means everything to me. selected to be the plat- on vacation with my family and My parents have ordinary jobs form for the frst ever it was fun, and when I was sev- and racing is expensive. They “Renault eSports Series.” en-years old, I tested a racing can support my racing at the kart. I really loved the speed in current level, but a crash or This competition is the racing kart so I got a racing a broken engine could stop owned by Renault and license and then a race-kart my season. When we leave operated by Events and started practicing. I did the kart or engines for bigger House, one of the com- almost a full season just prac- services at the workshop and panies responsible for ticing and this is my second full telling the mechanic what is 2017’s F1 eSports Series. season doing races. wrong or needs fxing, he al- ways seems to fnd a lot more Online qualifying rounds “I love my dad and he stuf that isn’t working! My for this competition are does everything for me, sponsors help me fnd a bufer already underway in Pro- for unexpected happenings to but he isn’t exactly a ject CARS 2. Our game keep racing. was selected due to the trained mechanic!” READ ON variety of Renault cars available in the game, and our experience in hosting top level tourna- ments. Within the racing game genre, engineering artists such as Players’ skills will be Casey Ringley are in high- tested in Renault tour- demand—it’s a role that takes ing cars, rallycross cars, years to master (Casey got his Clio Cup and Formula start back in the late 1990s), Renault. The top players incorporating a passion for will compete in a live mechanics, a deep knowledge fnal at Renault’s mar- of both engineering and keting zone at the 2018 physics, and—perhaps most British Grand Prix, and crucially—a test-driver’s ‘feel’ the winner will receive a for how a car is reacting on the full day of training at the limit. This is how he engineers UK’s Palmer Sport race the feel for in-game cars from school, including seat the most iconic automakers on time in Clio Cup and For- the planet. mula 3000 machinery. READ ON READ ON Keeping sane while working from home... Ana Vahia Tiza’s role as HR manager at Slightly Mad Studios is a challenging one, complicated enormously by the studio’s unique, award-winning, and pioneering Distributed Development System that sees staf working remotely on four continents and dozens of countries around the globe. That remoteness―phys- ical as well as cultural and linguistic―can lead to complex issues when communication is reliant solely on emails, Skype calls, HipChat, and no actual person-to-person contact. Ana has been with the company for many years, and has seen and experienced many of the pit- falls―and has also found the solutions through the years to fnding a happy balance between home-life 2 and home-work. READ ON Factor in the laser-scanned tracks, depicted in 4K resolu- tion, and you become deeply immersed into the world of speed. Every bump and kerb is reproduced and accurately placed, which means that you learn the rhythm of the track and can carry that over into the real world. Last year I was asked to do a project at the Nurburgring, and I had to get up to speed before I arrived. The best and only way to learn 170 corners in the two weeks I had avail- able, was to climb aboard a GT3 car and boot up Project CARS. For my line of work, it’s become as routine as going to the gym. THE EX ‘STIG’ BEN COLLINS HAS SEEN Logitech is probably the big- gest supplier of plug-in steer- THE FUTURE ing wheels for racing games and of gaming paraphernalia The frst racing games felt a bit like ‘Pong’ by comparison to the real thing. The frst ‘sim’ racer that in general. During a visit to had any value was ‘Grand Prix 2’ by Microprose. The tracks bore some resemblance to the places their HQ in San Francisco, I I was frequenting in a Formula 3 car, and the degree of discipline to sit there for hours shaving a was blown away by the scale few tenths of a lap time was familiar too. The game-changer was when my teammate linked our and professionalism of their computers and we had a three-way race between ourselves and Juan Pablo Montoya, who was eSports program. Their spon- extremely fast. sored players work in an envi- ronment as advanced as a For- There was an interminable pause in quality between Sim Racing then, and now. F1 teams spent mula One team; with coaches, millions creating rigs that lifted and shook you all around, while you steered and pedaled to the vid- dieticians, tacticians and ana- eo on a multi-screen. The experience split the drivers right down the middle: those that threw up lysts pressing for an advantage and those that lied about being sick. The irony was that despite the diabolical handling references wherever it can be found. these machines produced, the teams were able to extract useful data about diferent car setups. While you might expect that Here’s where Ian Bell at Slightly Mad Studios stepped in. Ian’s vision was to re-create, down to the level of elite performance last bolt and fber of carbon, every car that would appear in his vision for the ultimate sim racing from a corporate-backed op- game: Project CARS. Realism was the goal. Assimilating the varying weights and measures of the eration, the secret to the suc- cars provided a solid foundation, but the holy grail lay in recreating something almost intangible: cess of eSports is the way that the tyre model. it has democratized the Sport. Real racing costs somewhere The way a tyre behaves is organic and it’s what between the makes a real car so intuitive to human beings tens of thou- because it responds to every touch. After a The game-changer was when my teammate sands to the painstaking development process, we round- linked our computers and we had a three- millions. For a ed on an intuitive handling environment. No way race between ourselves and Juan Pablo few hundred more driving by Morse code. You could feel dollars, you the road through the feedback fickering Montoya, who was extremely fast can hook your through the steering wheel. You became one steering wheel with the car. into a virtual Nascar, Le Mans or F1 car and drive it like That’s where my role developed with the studio.