If you ever played Papyrus’ seminal Grand Prix Legends then you’ve read his name. Rich began working as a tester on NASCAR Racing (1994) and was with Papyrus at the end. In this interview, published in 2022, we discuss his time at the legendary studio and the design of Grand Prix Legends, including initial feelings of hurt at not being asked to join iRacing.
Video game development is rarely about one man, but if it was, then Terence Groening should certainly get a mention for his contributions to the genre as the man responsible for the physics of Sportscar GT, EA’s PC F1 and NASCAR games of the early 2000’s, rFactor, rFactor 2 and every title and rFpro simulator that spawned from ISI’s engine.
This interview with RSC details his early life and career, through to him joining iRacing in 2021.
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Often overlooked, properly setting the AI to match your speed is one of the single most important aspects of setup beside framerate for any racing game or simulation. Unfortunately most people bypass it as an afterthought or use completely different software as a guide because apparently “about 105” means something in a NASCAR sim because that GT3 game they played said so.
Even if you do setup the AI properly in a sim at one track this doesn’t mean you won’t have to fine-tune it, but it will mean a lot less work to do so. Balancing AI from track to track, making sure a 95-rating driver gets a 95-rating field of AI everywhere is something not a lot of developers put real time into.
It’s also important to be aware that skipping qualifying or accelerating it relies not on AI programming but on different coding altogether, and you’re trusting that you’ll end up going into the race with the field in a reasonably realistic order (spoiler: they won’t). This then leads to the inevitable poor race experience where the LMP car is panicked by the GT3 cars that qualified ahead of it, and it’s just not pretty.
I uploaded a video to YouTube in 2019 with advice on how to setup the AI, but decided to make a post here on RSC as well. Here are the basics:
1. Launch the sim you are trying to set the A.I. in. Choose (if possible) the fastest car at a track with a decent mix of high and slow speed corners (think Melbourne NOT Monza).
2. Run a qualifying session using whatever options you intend to use when racing and make a note of the laptime. (For example if you will use default setups when racing, use the default setup to set your laptime).
3. Move out of the fastest car (quit the session, restart a new one), let the A.I. set a time in the same type of session and conditions and see how it matches to your time set in the same car. Adjust the A.I. as needed to match your time, repeating the process to get as close as you want them to be to your time.
4. Enjoy your racing, preferably letting the AI all set a time before skipping or accelerating time in the qualifying sessions to avoid that pesky predictive code.
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