Trans-Am Racing ’68-’72 Preview

The historic racing series (from which Pontiac borrowed the name) muscles its way back into the limelight with classic cars and some impressive technology, courtesy of newcomers Engineering Animations Inc.

The ’60’s gave borth to many things – the integrated circuit, rock music festivals, and moon landings. But nothing captures the zeitgeist of the late ’60s better than its muscle cars. The racing series that captured the raw essence of these street cars? No, it wasn’t your father’s NASCAR. It was the Sports Car Club of America’s Trans-Am series.

Trans-Am pitted everything from Javelins to Porches to Barracudas to Mustangs against each other on winding tracks that ranged from 1.45 miles to just over four miles in length. Since the race cars were real production cars (unlike the fiberglass facsimiles raced today), in the sport’s heyday, the slogan “win on Sunday, sell on Monday” sparked a fierce rivalry between auto manufacturers to put the fastest cars on the track. The cache of Trans-Am was so great that it inspired Pontiac to license the series name for its new sports car.

Trans-Am, the sport, was killed by the gas crisis of the early ’70s and federal regulations that declawed muscle cars. Yet, though the golden era of Trans-Am racing died, the memory of it didn’t, especially for amateur race car driver Asif Chaudhri, then a producer at GT (he’s since moved to Visual Concepts), was not content to let an era of such powerful cars lie forgotten, so he obtained the Trans-Am license from the Sports Car Club of America. A technology partner appeared when Iowa-based Engineering Animations Inc. came to GT with a strong racing engine and physics package.

Not unlike Papyrus’ forthcoming Grand Prix Legends, Trans-Am will be more than just a racing game. It actually will attempt to capture and simulate an ephemeral high point in the sport’s history.

“Trans-Am started in ’65 or ’66,” says EAI Producer Adrian Penn, who co-designed the game with Chaudhri. “But ’68 to ’72 are considered the golden years of the sport, largely because of caliber drivers who were available – you had drivers like Mark Donahue, Parnelli Jones, and Dan Gurney. Also starting around ’67, the manufacturers started pouring money into the series. It became a grudge match that heightened around ’70, with Ford, GM, and American Motors really going at it.”

Expect the screen to refresh at a rate of 30fps. Car models average 250 polygons but can be as low as 75 and as high as 400.

And go at it they did. Unlike the high-tech, safety conscious, almost antiseptic quality of racing today, Penn emphasizes the grittiness that characterized Trans-Am racing and insists that it’s this atmosphere that the team hopes to capture with the game.

Races didn’t happen on ordinary circular courses where all-powerful judges could look down upon a bunched masses of cars, either. Instead, most races took place on longer, “closed road” style courses, which featured many minor elevation changes (which translated, at high speeds, into plenty of air time for drivers).

Real tracks raced from ’68 to ’72 are being re-created for Trans-Am.

These types of courses made bumping tougher to monitor, too, and this, much more frequent. The sport itself begs to be compared to the kind of racing practiced by delinquent teens on back roads. “Safety wasn’t a major concern,” says Penn, who has become a walking history book of the sport since starting the project. “Trees grew pretty close to the edge of the track.”

Another example of this were the car bodies that were dipped in acid to take off excess body weight and lower the center of gravity, though this created the downside that cars would sometimes fall apart during races. Penn assures us that this kind of random mechanical failure will be simulated.

The need for speed did cause some fatalities, including driver Jerry Titus, who died of injuries suffered in a bridge collision, and several spectators, who were killed by flying tires and “that sort of thing,” explains Penn.

To get that realism, EAI promises the most advanced physics engine ever in a racing game. Tough talk from a novice developer, but if anyone has the pedigree to pull it off on the first try, it may be EAI.

Located in Ames, Iowa, 30 minutes borth of Des Moines, the company has been creating CG video animations used in consulting and courtroom work for years. Modelling everything from anatomical blood flow to the last minutes of TWA Flight 800, EAI has built quite a reputation in the simulation field.

The question is, can a group of artists and engineers who bring legally admissible visual re-creations to the courtroom bring true gameplay to the PC? Considering a large portion of the sim work the company does is in re-creation of automobile accidents, EAI is in a position to bring many elements of realism to the game – elements that have yet to grace the interactive medium.

Specifically, an accurate physics model with six degrees of freedom, and in a landmark move, realtime damage modeling, calculated on-the-fly and unique to each crash.

While other racing game developers are just beginning to get their hands around this type of technology, EAI has been doing it for some time. Dr. Al Lynch (Ph.D. in physics), EAI’s vehicle dynamics expert, joined the company from General Motors Tech Center and is lending an unprecedented amount of expertise to the physical and collision modeling. Lynch describes the vehicle physics: “There are inertia effects. As you apply braking forces, it will nose down the vehicle. As you accelerate, it will squat the rear end down, so there are spring effects that make those things happen.”

Lynch’s physics are best displayed in tumultuous crashes demonstrated when a car flips end-over-side after hitting a corner embankment at high speed. “We know when we have a collision like that,” says an excited Penn, “what point on the car you’ve made contact. We know the impact vector, we know the energy and the forces involved.”

Penn and Lynch explain how all this data is used to calculate “crush.” There are stiffness properties at each vertex on the mesh of the car, with the front and rear stiffer than the sides. Every vertex has a crush parameter, so as you crush particular points, they move in, distorting the polygon to reflect the impact.

“It’s done in real time,” says Penn proudly, “it’s not canned. It’s unique every time. If you hit stationary objects, it’s going to be different than if you hit something that’s moving. We know which vertices we are affecting, and we also know where each car’s texture map is being affected, so we can build damage maps on top of the affected areas.”

“Some of the damage is reversible,” Penn adds, “Since we know how much damage is stored at each vertex, we can also back it out. So you can have your pit guys bang out panels.”

A proprietary tool called Vismodel was used to create the vehicles. Is it a good tool? Well, the company is providing DirectModel for Microsoft. The cars above can be seen in three stages: a wireframe model, the model with flat shading, and the final car complete with texture maps.

Pit crews will be able to band the dents out of 13 different classic car marks and models, but different team paint schemes and options will make the actual number of selectable vehicles much higher. The game will also feature 19 of the real drivers and 13 tracks of the period. This turned out to be something of a challenge, though, since several of the tracks are no longer in existence. As a result, the EAI designers took surveying trips to re-create the courses and used a high-end Global Positioning System to gather altitude data.

The game will include a single-race mode and a season mode, complete with drivers’ and manufacturers’ point championships, as well as an arcade mod and simulation mode. A single-player race puts drivers behind the wheel against 19 other nonplayer cars while as many as 16 players can compete in the multiplayer mode via LAN or the internet.

A true 3D cockpit will be modeled for each car, enabling players to glance left and right. But surely the best feature of the cockpit view is apex tracking (seen in Microsoft’s CART Precision Racing), which pans the camera into the turn the way drivers naturally turn their heads. This will be a welcome break from the problematic, fixed-camera cockpit views seen in other racing titles.

The AI in the game has been modeled to re-create the styles of the better-known drivers. “We want you to feel like you’re racing against the driver, not just his car,” says GT Product Marketing Manager Tony Kee. “Parnelli Jones was an aggressive driver, he bumped a lot, so when you’re familiar with the game and you see his car coming up in the rearview mirror, you’ll realize he may hassle you more than others.”

But opposing vehicles won’t be limited to rigid, preprogrammed behavioral patterns. The team is implementing a startlingly complex AI system to create an AI formula that works not unlike the human thought process. “We’re training these neural nets right now,” says Lead Programmer John Pursey, “to learn the best path around the tracks and dynamically recalculate how to get around obstacles very fluidly. So there won’t be a jerky or static behavior to the AI cars.”

Of course, all this innovation won’t come cheap. The game will require a 3D accelerator hardware, and while it hasn’t been set yet, the minimum system will be either a P166 or P200. Penn also explains that the team has been working closely with Intel, so expect AGP support as well as support for the second generation 3D chipsets from 3DFX and PowerVR. There will be force-feedback compatibility with most high-end steering devices.

Still early in development, EAI plans to add graphic touches like specular highlighting and environment mapping, and Penn has some ideas on how to really add some flavor with the help of particle system effects. “If you lock your brakes up going into a corner,” says Penn, “you’ll see smoke coming off your pads. If you are having engine trouble, there are three different types of smoke that will issue from underneath your hood – you’ll see basic white steam for overheating, bluish smoke when you’re burning some oil, and black smoke if you’re in deep trouble.”

The audio will complement all these visual features with fully 3D spacialized sound and plenty of ambient effects. The soundtrack is expected to be on the traditional rock side, and an announcer will call the action.

While EAI certainly demonstrated to us that it has the technology to compete with veteran game developers, it remains to be seen whether or not the company can deliver artful gameplay in its first attemps to reach a hardcore audience. And one has to wonder if this rookie team truly understands the importance of refining the intangibles.

Unlike the anime-postered action-figure-cluttered desks of many development offices, EAI is refreshingly devoid of juvenilia, and it’s reaffirming to see developers taking their project as seriously as many paying consumers will. The meticulous nature of the people involved suggests that if they’re not sure it’s ready, they’ll procure the resources to polish Trans-Am to a Turtle Wax finish. And if that’s the case, this team of 15 Iowa boys are gonna give everyone one hell of a race.