Apple Maps, Amazon’s Fire Phone, New Coke and Project Motor Racing.
Each had inauspicious beginnings, and after a slice of humble pie, either continued to work hard or called it quits.
The Straight4 Studios team is aiming for the former, despite well-documented setbacks.
Later this month, the embattled sim racing title will release a much-vaunted ‘Patch 2.0’. Across PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, so far we know it will spread recent tyre model changes across further categories and optimise its performance. Then, a few days later, the Super GT-themed Japanese race car paid pack will arrive.
However, according to the creation team, despite the ambitious update moniker, work will not stop there.
“We’re not finished, we have long-term plans,” explained Straight4 Co-Founder and Chief Development Officer, Kevin Boland, to Traxion.
“There are things that I’ve said in the public domain that will be done, and they will be done.”
“This [project] is my life. I’m not a multimillionaire. I’m a guy who, just like yourself, goes to work. I’m privileged enough to be in charge of the game. To be in charge of the team and to manage the team.
“My passion is still coding, I’m in the middle of trying to figure out something with trees, for example.
“All of us at Straight4, this is what we wanted to do. We partnered with [publisher and tech provider] Giants for a longer-term future.”
Emphatic. Impassioned. Boland’s distinctive Irish brogue is in full force as he speaks to us from his home office, surrounded by a surfeit of sim racing wheels.
These are strong statements, but what’s actually changing?
VR progress update
Pre-launch, there were provocative statements about switching from Unreal to Giants Engine for the graphics, in part to Epic’s rocky track record with virtual reality.
However, then came the news that VR wouldn’t make the release, and nearly four months later, it’s still absent.
“We’ve spent the last few months obviously making sure that we bring out the game, that this version [Patch 2.0] that we have is what people expect, and that baseline is there,” says Boland.
“So, where we are right now is [working on] performance. Performance is king.
“One of the things that we need to improve upon before we can [release] VR is our submission list. Which basically means that we need to make the CPU side of rendering cheaper. Because if I can make the CPU side of the rendering cheaper, I can lean on the GPU to do the work.
“One of the big things we’re leaning in on is I’m going to actually make a system that basically does most of the draw submission stuff on the GPU already. So when I turn my head one way, and I’m looking down a forest, and then I turn my head the other way, and I’m looking at a grandstand with people in it, I’m not getting sudden frame rate drops.
“And then it’s all about setting up all the draw calls and setting up the screens. The plan is to bring something out in the next few months.
“I’m desperate to bring out some of the things I want to bring out, but there are massive amounts of testing and risk with it. The last thing I want to do is destroy people’s experiences.”
More mods expected?
One of Project Motor Racing’s feathers in its cap is user-generated content. In fact, scratch that. It should be user-generated content, but it’s been notable only by its absence.
Yes, there are wild engine options for GT4 cars and the MX-5, and there’s the Praga, but not a single track has been released yet.
That is expected to change later this month, with the fictional High Rock Circuit available cross-platform.
However, that’s not exactly a proliferation of mods.
When asked if the release of such has been slower than expected, Kevin is blunt: “Yes.
“But you must remember the modding teams have evolved from people who make stuff as a passion project, to people who want to get paid for it. So, they’re going to go where they think they’ll get the most.
“So we need to first off, get built up. We need to get our documentation a little bit better, as currently it’s really intimidating to look at. We’ll just keep building on that, and we’ll keep improving it.
“There have also been a few mods that we just can’t release because one, licensing, and two, we can’t put [out] anything with tobacco [sponsorship]. There are things that other games could get away with modding because it wasn’t an official platform that went over to console, we have to worry about the PEGI ratings etc.
“And then also, we’ve had a few cars that are too close to the bone when it comes to other cars that we don’t quite have in the game yet.
“We’re working on it daily, though, and that’s always going to stay free.
“It’s in its infancy. It’s going to grow and we plan on doing a whole pile of things there. But first off, let’s get to the baseline.”
Career mode changes
While the prevalence of ranked multiplayer systems has increased in the past half-decade, user stats for many titles (such as Gran Turismo 7, for example) suggest that offline racing still rules the roost.
One of the problems with Project Motor Racing is a career mode that felt flat. There are some interesting ideas, with a cash-based approach (including repairs) tied to sponsor types. It was also devoid of a sense of achievement, with no clear end goal. Paired with an asinine collision system, you could all too easily be backed into a corner.
This is set to be revised with the upcoming Patch 2.0.
“We’ve done [a series of] small but impactful changes [to the career].
“One of the first things we’ve done is reorder how the sponsorship model and everything works so that the player understands what it is they buy into for each championship season. You didn’t quite get what you were doing when you set up.
“The second part is that we’ve introduced [being able to] win trophies [alongside] winning championships. And then there was a hard limit to 20 seasons, and it seemed like, ‘Oh, it’s over with’. So instead, you have to unlock these, and you have your own personal hall of fame, which shows what you’ve completed and what you haven’t.
“And after finishing the career, you can go back and try to win everything. It’s just trying to make the player feel more connected to their career than we did [at launch].
“We [also] have so many ideas longer term when it comes to [the] career mode. I’m really excited to lean in and figure out what we can do.
“People who didn’t go into career mode before now feel like they have something to build towards. It’s not just a survival, but also a sense of achievement.”
Patch 2.0 expectations
Mackem sim racing YouTuber DaveCam recently revisited Project Motor Racing and was rightly critical of its unnatural throttle response.
“Yes, that is actively being worked on; he was making some very good points,” concludes Boland when quizzed about this. It’s not the only element in the near-term pipeline.
“There’s more stuff going to come with the [multiplayer] licence points. We’ve anti-cheat coming in. We’ve fixed the [online] stability issues, where players were disconnecting.
“We have a whole new lighting model coming because we definitely didn’t like the lighting. There are also some improvements on PlayStation 5 coming. We found a couple of little bugs that are our own fault, and we don’t plan on settling on the PlayStation. I think it can give us an awful lot more.
“There’s a new-look user interface, which we think is an awful lot better. We have spent a ton of time putting in tooltips for all settings to make sure everyone understands in-game what’s going on.
“There are so many little things coming in on this next build, we’re just hoping that people are happy.
“What happened after launch was we thought there was a silver bullet, and then we realised there was no silver bullet. So, we spent the last few months, little by little, going to work and not over-promising.”
Further changes are also discussed, with collision detection a constant bugbear and mentions of “softbody next”, plus confirmation that the likes of Michi Hoyer and Jesper Pedersen (pro sim racers) are working daily to help change its course.
There’s a long list, a long-term plan, and we’ll see if they pull it off not just with Patch 2.0, but in the coming months too.
You can watch and listen to the full interview with Project Motor Racing’s Kevin Boland on the Traxion.GG YouTube Channel.