NowGamer
We chat with Alan Hartman, studio manager at Turn10, about Xbox One launch title Forza 5.
So tell us about Forza 5.
Here’s a little secret for you: we were working on this title before we shipped Forza 4. Chris Tector, who is our chief architect, he has been working with the [Xbox One] hardware team for the last four years. He was involved with the early chip discussions and there’s actually chips on the motherboard that are there because of Chris Tector’s involvement. Before we had shipped Forza 4 we had the game architected by Chris. Literally the month before our game released to the public, our dev team was already off building the foundations of Forza 5. It’s a whole new engine, from the ground up, re-architected for the Xbox One and I mean truly re-architected.
The reason why we can go for 1080p/60, is the reason why we’ve got the graphical fidelity. We went big on materials in this. I don’t know if you’ve heard about our material system, but even the way we build up paint now, we don’t just do a paint colour, we build the paint up on the car like you do in real life. We do a base coat, we do a metallic coat, and each of those interacting with the light differently. And then we do the clear coat on top of it and each of those is interacting with the light, and that’s how you get the depth and richness of the car. But if we just did that, we would have ended up with cars that almost seem too perfect.
In Forza 4, we had cars that looked really good in auto-vista. So shiny and so perfect, but we had to get the touch of the human hand in there. Going in and getting the scratches on the rotors, getting the score of the paint you get when you wax your car, getting the orange peel from the effect of the spray drops hitting the paint. And then we went into our environment, which was the same rendering system, the same lighting system for our cars…
The image-based lighting from Forza 4?
No, no, this is new. This is the material system we’ve brought to the Xbox One, where no material has a colour or texture, it has properties and interactions with light. We can literally go in and go ‘This surface is concrete, no, we’re going to make it asphalt, no, we’re going to make it gun metal’, and it just works in the environment. We don’t have to go in and tweak the lighting and the shading like we have in the past; everything works with light the way it’s supposed to.
That’s really key, because with the power of Xbox One we don’t want to go off and have to deal with eight times the complexity of an air environment. We had to invest in the technology to be able to build smarter. It goes all the way back to how we used laser-scanning, which doesn’t just give us surfaces, it gives us colour and texture as well. We can bring it back as reference for the artists and quickly bring it up to that quality we’re going for.
The level of detail really adds to that feeling of car ownership. The more real things seem, the more you feel like it’s yours.
One of the things we wanted to address the most was people saying the world could feel lifeless and sterile, it was too clean, too perfect. We want to really bring the world to life through the roar of the crowds, pit crews moving around, balloons and helicopters and birds and confetti. Doing that, you achieve a level of detail that’s rich, and not perfect, but something that feels real.
Do these small details have any bearing on how the car physically handles?
Yeah, actually, if you get out into that loose rubber, it’ll affect the feel of it. It’s another texture.
And are you treating the car interiors with as much love as the exteriors?
In Forza 4, we had auto-vista on 24 cars. We’re bringing that level of love – that you can climb around the car, open it up – to every car. Hundreds of cars. It was key for us to make sure that Forza 5 was an epic game. It couldn’t be a mini-Forza, a hey-we’re-kinda-shipping Forza. If we were going for launch, we thought, we have to go all in. We have to do a full Forza that we can call Forza 5. Big tracks, real world tracks, which meant hundreds of cars, diversity of cars. It meant going off and adding open wheel cars to the game, to make it be Forza-worthy.
Did you storyboard the tracks this time around, the way you did in Forza 4?
We did, though we put a slightly different tack on it this time around. We actually sent a team out to the Alps and they captured tens of thousands of photos and videos and measurements. From that, we created a fictionalised universe, as you know, the fictional track, the back history, everything. We wanted to go out and say ‘What is the track we really want to pour ourselves into? What is the thing that will really show off what Xbox One is about?’ We had a lot of areas we considered, but we wanted density and light, so that started pointing us more towards the city. And then we thought ‘What will show that high frequency detail? What will show something that’s not too clean and pristine?’
So we went more and more old world, and as we did the research, we started to fall in love with Prague. All the bridges and the rivers. If you go to Prague, you won’t find that race track in Prague; we did the same thing we did with the Alps. We thought ‘We need to make an interesting and challenging track’, so we took what we knew and decided to create a ribbon running through Prague that will show off the castles, give elevation gain… so we built that fantasy track in Prague, then wrapped the reality of Prague around it.
What kind of thing is being added for the Forza community this time round, considering that people won’t only need to buy a new game to play it, but a new console as well?
We took that very seriously, and this links back to what I was saying about an epic Forza for the launch. Because we knew we couldn’t do a small game and say go and spend hundreds of dollars to go and play this small game. We wanted to give them plenty of reasons to get excited for this console.
And that’s part of being first-party, is saying ‘What are the platforms we really want to get behind?’ So cloud was something we started thinking about early on and thinking about what we wanted to do with that power. Some things were easy. Something that the community will love is dedicated servers, you always want to play on dedicated servers. That allows us to have massive multiplayer games of a high quality nature. But that was kind of easy, right, so what else could we do? That’s where Drivatar really started, the thing we’ve been working on. When we came to the next gen we asked what we could do with this sort of power. It was the idea of stripping it down to the base technology; what do we really want to do with it?
We put it up there as what we can really do for our community, and so the idea is that you’ll never race alone. We don’t build AI any more, we just build a system that captures players and delivers them back to you. So it really is, when we say the end of AI, it is the end of AI. We won’t make AI any more; we’re just going to unleash the players on each other, in a sense. And of course we’ll allow you to say ‘Hey, do I want to really challenge myself? Do I want to hold back? Who do I want to race with?’ And every time you’re racing, you’re training your AI. Every time you connect, that AI is getting uploaded and recording down your friends and the rest of the universe out there to play against. It’s an ever-evolving game. The game will honestly be a lot different three to six months after launch compared to what it will be at launch, because that AI community, that Drivatar community, will be fleshed out.
http://www.nowgamer.com/features/1968892/forza_5_interview_xbox_one_hardware_building_tracks_drivatar_explained.html
