Race and Vehicle Simulations

Kunos Simulazioni have grown up in the public eye; starting with their first sim, ‘namie’ (freely available), they went on to code the highly respected and deeply flawed masterpiece that was netKar Pro (their first commercial sim), before maturing with the official Ferrari F1 Sim (Ferrari Virtual Academy). Now they’re back with their second commercial product, Assetto Corsa. Will they deliver on their talent this time?

Jon Denton was invited to take a sneak peak at development …

Campagnano di Roma is a peaceful Roman town in the Latium region of Italy. Dating back over a thousand years, it’s sleepy, confined streets reflect a calm solitude that must echo the distant, catastrophic wars of antiquity when the race fans roll into town. For this town is but a few short miles from the Autodromo Vallelunga Piero Taruffi, the sand oval track built back in the 50s and now, homologated by the FIA and expanded, scene of many an F1-test and where, this sunny spring time morning, I find myself ensconced in the offices of Kunos Simulazioni for a test-drive of my very own.

Kunos Simulazioni (Kunos) have been around the sim-racing world for quite a while now, and regular readers of AutoSimSport will need no introduction. Most famous for netKar Pro (nKPro)—regarded by many as the finest commercial simulator currently available (if by that one refers to driving feel and accuracy of the tyre model)—that was developed on a shoestring and a diet of boiled rice back in 2005, Kunos’ involvement with sim-racing can be traced further back than that—all the way back to the turn of the century and the original, free netKar (namie) which Kunos founder Stefano Casillo had developed out of his shed (metaphorically speaking) and on top of which sat the core of nKPro.

netKarPro was not well received on its release back in 2006, primarily due to problems with netcode, but not helped by a community that, at the time, felt that the moon on a stick should just be the beginning of what they deserved from a racing sim. Kunos was, and still is, a small team (but not, I add, just one man), and the reaction at the time came as quite a shock. Now, moving on to their new sim Assetto Corsa, meaning essentially ‘race setup’, they are moving forward with their eyes open much wider, buoyed no doubt by their professional advancement that has seen them swap the cold windy flats of Trieste for the more gentle climes of Southern Italy and now far more aware of what sim-racers might want from a title.

Having A Chat

‘When I was making netKarPro, I used to look around on forums and I would see people talking so much about this or that feature, but the reality was different,” Stefano tells me in his clean, Italian-modern office. ‘We put in things such as the “full mode” where drivers would have to wait for repairs, or the pitboard being the only information for a driver in a race. These things were nice, but when it came down to it, maybe only twenty percent of players would use them.’

Does this hint at a lower focus on ‘hard core’ simulation elements in AC?

‘No, I don’t think so,’ Stefano says, ‘we are building the physics and graphics engines from the ground-up from scratch, and we are aiming for as much realism as possible in tyre behaviour and fundamental vehicle dynamics. Using an evolution of the existing netKarPro engine would have involved too much fudging, a ground up rebuild also helps us take more advantage of new technology, both in software and hardware.’

Aristotelis Vasilakos (Aris) joined the Kunos team last year to assist on working with the physics of AC, (you may know him from his work on the P&G mod for GTR2), and he felt this an opportune time to air his thoughts. ‘The first thing, for us, when we started to work, is that we need a physics engine that is workable across as many platforms as possible, and I mean car platforms. In netKarPro, the base physics were focussed on single-seater race cars, which pull high G-ratings and are very light, often using slick tyres with stiff sidewall construction. This meant that, when we started to introduce heavier cars that had more bodywork and overall inertia, we could not make them feel as good to drive as the original, single-seater cars.’

This was something Aris and I discussed in last issue’s piece on Ferrari Virtual Academy 2011 Adrenaline Pack, where the newly introduced Ferrari 458 Trofeo Cup car did not feel like a solid, planted GT car, but a little more spongy, like a road car.

‘Yes, as I said to you at the time,’ confirms Aris, ‘it was a balancing act to set that car up, {and} this is just the sort of thing we want to avoid. AC is an open platform for modders,’ he reveals, ‘and we hope, over time, to see a wide variety of cars being created in the community, but also, we plan to release a variety of different machinery in the core release. Every sim-racer has a different opinion on what is the finest race car or road car to drive—not everyone wants to race F1 cars or Formula Fords—so we want to offer a selection on initial release that will offer something to everyone’s tastes.’

Already then we can see a wholesale departure from the naivety of nKPro. So how, I ask, have they got around this limitation, what is the starting point?

The first thing we wanted to get right is a simple car,’ explains Aris, ‘a road-going, front wheel drive hatchback that can generate about 1-G in cornering forces on road tyres. If we started at this point, it should be relatively straightforward to move up the scale to cars with more power and grip.’ Aris turns with a grin to Stefano, who chirps up, “So we used my car! The Fiat 500 Abarth.’

At 165BHP and 1,035KG, the 500, or cinquecento, will represent a vehicle quite close to what many of us may have sampled on the road. In my experience, this is often where many sims fall down. There are sims on the market that can do a great job with lower speed road cars, but their physics model stumbles when presented with beastly race cars on slicks and with tons of aero grip. At the same time, other sims do the race cars well and come to pieces with softer sprung, road cars equipped with tyres more suited to comfort than speed. Arguably, from the sim-racer’s perspective, both are race-able, and both require very different driving styles.

‘Going back to what we were saying earlier, about the hardcore sim part,’ Stefano says watching me sip my fourth espresso of the morning (it was a 6AM flight out of London that had brought me here!), ‘what I came to realise with netKarPro is that there is a group of people in the community who want things as hardcore and realistic as they can get. They want to replicate what it is like to race cars in real life; but there are many who want a more open and free experience. Many don’t want to be penalised for a white line infringement, or made to wait patiently for a rear wing adjustment, and even among those who do, not all of them have the time to indulge in it. When you have to spend hours making a setup for a race, and practicing a track to have it perfect, sometimes sim-racing becomes a bit like work.’ A sentiment to which I can only agree, having spent enough hours on setup pages myself. ‘I am not saying that this is not something some people enjoy, but there should be a choice, and there is no reason not to make a sim with a hardcore physics model, but with gameplay elements that don’t force the driver into being an engineer, or having to take the whole thing so seriously; this is our hobby, our passion, it should be fun!’

Experience talking, and I can’t say I disagree; I remember talking to Stefano about such things in 2005, and thinking that making a sim as close to real life as possible was exactly what I wanted, but I can say that in my netKarPro ‘career’, I have raced using ‘full mode’ precisely twice. Both times I had to work on setups for hours and hours outside of full mode, and practice the circuit in question for hours to ensure I would not crash in the race. It was a challenge, but was it fun? The key, for me, is a sim with balance, where I can give myself that challenge if I so choose it, but if I want a more casual experience then it should be there as an option.

It’s generally regarded in the community that the best realisations of race tracks in modern sim-racing are the laser scanned efforts by iRacing, and Kunos have embraced this technology for AC. Marco Massarutto, production director for Kunos, feels that, for AC to compete in the marketplace, they need to invest in this area. ‘Really, aside from the driving feel and physics, the areas we want to improve over previous titles are the racing environments. We are working with an all-new DX11-based graphics engine, and so we really want to do justice to the circuits we have in AC.’

Those circuits that have been confirmed currently include Magione, Monza, Imola, and the slightly less Italian Silverstone. ‘We had to go with laser scanning, the bar for circuit quality was pushed forward when this technology was introduced, and we are very happy with the results so far,’ Marco tells me.

Big name licences such as Silverstone and Monza surely don’t come easily, and I ask him about the challenges involved.

‘Silverstone and Monza were great to work with, but you call up some circuits, and there can be someone on the end of the line who really has no idea what you are talking about, these people are motorsports people, they don’t know anything about video games. We’ve had people thinking we want to put on a race at their circuit, people thinking I want to paint pictures of their circuit, and on one occasion I had the phone slammed down on me!’

Some absolutely stunning WIP pictures have been posted around on the AC Facebook page, and the standard of graphical artistry being put into these tracks belies a deep passion for the pursuit.

‘We are very proud of some of the circuits we have, going to Monza for the laser scan was a special time for all of us, it is a cathedral to motor racing’s history, and while it may sometimes seem like a boring circuit, especially in a Fiat 500, when you are inside the circuit there is such a feeling of history and passion for the sport.’ Nuvolari, Caracciola, Rosemeyer, Ascari, Fangio, Moss, Hill, Clark, Surtees, Stewart, Fittipaldi, Andretti, Lauda, Piquet, Prost, Senna, Schumacher, Alonso, Vettel—since 1922, this place has crowned kings. ‘We really want to do it justice—if we can put just a piece of that special feeling into our simulator, then I will die a happy man.’

The Italian feel of the circuits on offer may not be a big surprise given that Kunos is a largely Italian concern, but the announcement of Silverstone hints that, as the development moves along, we may see more of an international feel to the sim. ‘I am working very hard on securing a good selection of circuits,’ confirms Marco. ‘It’s still early days, but it’s important for us to go to release with enough circuits to present drivers with a wide enough selection to keep them occupied.’

What about the flexibility of the racing environment? Can we expect a dynamic surface, wet weather, marble build up, maybe some leaves floating majestically in the breeze?

‘We’re not really committing to a massive feature set at this stage,’ Stefano replies, ‘we want to walk before we can run, {and} we are so early in the development process that the importance, for us, at this stage, is getting the basics right. It all depends on how things go with the implementation of the base, core simulator, and the solidity of components such as the physics, graphics and multiplayer components as well as AI that will determine what features we look at later in the development cycle.’

AI? So this won’t just be an online sim?

‘Not at all. I’m not sure I believe in going down only one route nowadays,’ Stefano muses. ‘People sometimes just want to have a bit of a drive around for fun against AI, where they can pause the game and setup things to their preference. The more serious online racer is not the only sim-racer out there, and we want AC to be enjoyed by as many people as possible.’

So, online serious simmer, offline casual simmer, what about the car nuts?

‘Well, we hope to have a good spread of cars in the initial release, hopefully something for everyone,’ Aris chirps, brightly. ‘We’re still working on many licences, but cars like the KTM X-Bow, Formula Abarth, Fiat 500, and Ferrari P4/5 Competizione already bring a good spread of differing machinery to the sim, and a vintage singleseater is something we’re working on too. The important thing, for us, is that they feel right, and so with the licences we have acquired, we have ensured full access to the machines in question, as well as all the data available on the setup and overall design of the cars.’

This bodes well for those seeking an authentic ride; unfettered access to the car in question is a must for accurate simulation, and Stefano confirms my thought when he says, ‘We don’t see ourselves making the sort of sim that comes out with three of four hundred cars, because with the size of team we have, and the attention to detail we want to give these vehicles, that could take years and years. Aris and I have recently spent an entire day just talking about and working on the vintage single-seater’s suspension. It was a good, productive day, but at the same time, we want to get the feel of these cars as good as we can get them, and for that we’re focussing on the details.’

There has been clear indication on the AC website that this sim will be open for modders to work on their own content for the sim—how much focus, I ask, eyeing another espresso, is being given to this area of the sim?

‘Because from the start we knew we wanted the sim to be moddable, we have built the software like a framework,’ explains Aris. ‘This means that we should be able to release some relatively simple tools that will let mod teams work on new content, or modifications to the sim or GUI. We want to make it so that modders don’t find it too hard to implement what they need. In the past, this was difficult as netKar was not built with any of this in mind. With AC, we want to introduce something that people can enjoy both as a racing sim and also as a launch pad for their creativity.’

It all sounds jolly grand, doesn’t it? The enthusiasm this small team have to create a simulator that is not just about racing, but also about driving, enamours me greatly. The, sheer, visceral joy of piloting a motor car is something they want to deliver to the home driver, and with their pedigree, you feel that they can do it.

Perhaps sensing that another espresso may have been a little too much, the lads from Kunos suggest I occupy my mind with something other than caffeine—do you, they inquire, want to have a go?

Having A Go

No sooner was it said than done, and I was thrown into their handy bucket seat and presented with a choice of cars and tracks. Now, being something of a veteran at trying sims for the first time with an audience, my focus was to pick up something with a manageable power-to-weight ratio and basic handling that I could easily relate to. Hmm, Fiat 500 Abarth, or Formula Abarth? After insulting anyone in the room that might own a Fiat 500, I promptly opted for the single-seater, at Imola.

After a brief (rather impressively so) loading sequence, the car was dropped on the track, and immediately the rawness of this pre-alpha version of the sim was apparent. Modifications to the seat position and controller configuration had to be done via a ‘console’ within the sim, similar to that seen in first-person-shooters, and the car was positioned on the startline, rather than in a pit garage. Clutch modelling had not been implemented yet, so it was just me and two pedals. I clonked the sequential shifter into first, and set forth on my way, the first-ever test-drive of Assetto Corsa.

Gingerly arriving at Traguardo, the first thing to hit me was the solidity of the steering, the firmness of grip that feels so ‘connected’. There is no discernible controller lag and the force feedback presents the firm feel of a tyre contact patch reacting to the change of direction cleanly and decisively. This firm feedback gives me confidence, and I try to up the speed. Then, at Acque Minerali (named for a botanical park in nearby Bologna, and not Italian for mineral water as is commonly, and incorrectly, inferred), I fly into the gravel. My first experience with the Fanatec Clubsport pedals is granting me the first chance to try a load-cell brake pedal, and being used to a standard spring-based system (albeit a firm spring on my BRD Speed 7s at home), I was not hitting the pedal hard enough. Ok, something else to think about; ‘act like its real life’I tell myself as I scramble out of the gravel in front of my expectant crowd.

In these early stages, there is no damage turned on in the sim, which is a godsend as I take a few laps to get used to the feel of the load-cell brake pedal. When I start to arrive at corners at the right speed and push a little with the car, I find a trance-like feeling taking me over as I start to process the way this car works. The steering feedback is simply stunning; under hard braking, the car jiggles and squirms in a very natural way, but not in such a way as to be unpredictable. The planted feel of the car keeps surprising me as I come to expect ‘sim-like’ motions or snap oversteer on braking or heavy throttle. The car behaves, full stop. It is a racing car and should not be sliding and flying about the place, and this is what happens. The Formula Abarth has more downforce than it does power, and this shows. Admittedly, the early setup is understeery, not unlike what you might expect on a real car, and this means in the faster turns the back end stays well planted on heavier throttle and can be driven hard without necessarily kicking back. It takes me some laps to trust in this—many sims over the years have taught me to be wary of a sim-car’s behaviour, never quite trusting in the early laps what the back end might do. For AC, I had to train myself out of this behaviour, until you really start pushing; it is not tricky to keep the car on the track.

The feel of the contact patch on the front tyres, directly through the steering, became my opiate as I built up more and more speed with this little gem of a single-seater. Feeling the front tyre slip through my hands becoming more and more natural, I could easily initiate understeer by breaking the traction with a heavy steering input, then bring it back by releasing lock on the wheel, no hunting for grip, it could be felt directly through the wheel-rim, making small corrections to trajectory feel intuitive. In fact, they are so intuitive they are barely ‘felt’ at all, they just happen!

What this gives the driver is a remarkable feel for the car on entry, the weighting of the front tyres under brakes, the yaw on turn in, and deftness on controlling longitudinal weight transfer. Understeering towards the apex at Tosa or lasering into Piratella at high speed, with each passing lap this sim feels more and more glorious.

As Marco proceeds to post a few pictures to Facebook of my ‘concentrating face’, I decide to try something else. Slipping neatly into the P4/5 Competizione, a race-prepared and heavily modified Ferrari 430 in GT3 spec, and much heavier than the Abarth, I do so anticipating that it will feel quite different from the driver’s seat.

The same, clean, decisive feedback could be felt instantly in the P4/5, but the weight of the car meant a tidier hand needed to be applied on entries, and care taken not to overwhelm the chassis. Again, the load cell caused me problems, the extra weight of the car needing and even harder stamp on the pedal, especially as I took the car to Monza, where there are some seriously big stops. Starting to push in the P4/5, there was a clear feeling of much more weight in the car, and with it the added respect you have to give the controls. Smoothness was rewarded, and driving it like a Formula Abarth in the early laps mainly led to me having big slides on entry through being too aggressive with the steering. As I began to settle down and let the car have its head, rather than wrestle it, that trance started to come back, and the feel from the car began to become more and more intuitive. Provided I could get it stopped in time! The chassis would soak up kerbs with minimal fuss and started to feel like a very nice drive, if far more serene than the Formula Abarth. Pushing more and more made the car bite back, and sometimes quite hard. But a smooth hand on the steering wheel ensured no big surprises, and as the laps ticked away, I started to get a great feel for the slip of the front and rear tyres, diving deep on brakes into Parabolica, then hard on the throttle, no surprises, and gently drifting to the outside edge of the circuit for a full speed drag to the Variante del Rettifilo.

It was time for the big one—the vintage single seater. AKA the legendary Lotus 49.

The Lotus 49 seems to be making a major comeback in sim-racing recently (iRacing, rFactor2, and pCARS). Boasting 410BHP and weighing in at 600KG, I actually sense a mild trepidation when selecting this car; whilst everything so far has felt natural enough to drive for me, they all bear relation to cars I have driven in real life. This is a step beyond.

I take it to Monza figuring there are less corners to kill myself on.

Initially it feels … fine. Very stable, connected to the road and manageable. A reasonable foot on the throttle keeps the back-end in check, and once the speed loads up, you can be fairly heavy with the throttle and not expect wild, lurid slides. This is more like it. And the sound, woah, it sounds tremendous, the induction note on throttle so throaty and full of beef, while the off throttle wheeze makes me grin uncontrollably. I turn to Aris: ‘This is great!’

Again, the car is setup for understeer, and you can feel it through Curva Grande as the fronts scrub. But instead of ploughing off the circuit, the tyre model responds more deftly. Break of peak grip does not mean no grip, and so when the fronts break traction, they drag at the nose and skip over the track, slowing the car all the time. Let off a little and let the front grip come back in, and she responds, the steering comes back, and once again that glorious force feedback let’s me feel the grip available as I start to push on with this fine motor car. Maintaining a healthy fear on the throttle on exits, I keep hearing Aris in my ear saying, ‘give it more throttle, go on.’ But with limited laps, whilst I started to get a feel for the way this car can be driven on the throttle, it will take many more for my confidence to build to really get to grips with the vehicle. Aris duly leaps into the seat and shows me how it is done, driving the car confidently on the throttle, braking deep and letting the car yaw mildly, then getting on the right-hand pedal and deftly controlling the oversteer.

The feeling I get from AC is that each car is a very, very detailed model, and as such, one learns more and more about the machine with each passing lap. Cars like the Lotus 49 could bring surprises even after 2000KMs of running, the depth of the simulation is so remarkable that I get the feeling this could steal a lot of my time, even before any AI or online racing comes into it. Curiously, though, this is not through having to learn to drive the sim. The cars feel stable and usable easily at lower speeds, as they should. No one flies off the road in the pitlane in normal conditions, and most of us manage to drive a car from place to place on the road without having big slides or end-over-end crashes. But when you start to push in AC, the feedback from the car takes you in, and as you find yourself braking deeper and deeper into Rivazza, you gain a flush of endorphins as the car hooks into the apex. Getting it right and being quick is a challenge, but not an impossible one—the car is never unpredictable in its responses, it behaves itself, provided its driver does.

Most of my early ‘moments’ with AC saw me driving it as if it were a ‘sim’ and not like a ‘car’.  A curious response, but over years of sim-racing, we build pathways in our brain that tell us what a virtual car will do in given situations, and it hasn’t always been the same as a real car, even in the best sims on the market. AC requires you to train your brain out of this, and look at your own performance as a driver to analyse what could be causing the car to behave certain ways. As I found more and more pace in the Formula Abarth, after lunch and espresso, I started to recognise problems with my driving that were causing me to lose speed, and they were the same problems that affect my real life performance. My style translated across and, well, rather annoyingly, I developed the same habits that cause me to not always find the sharp end in real life racing. My tidy, smooth inputs in high speed stuff reflected in a glorious feeling through Piratella. But my tendency to overwhelm front grip and take more than one ‘bite’ at a corner in the slower stuff blighted me through Acque Minerali. I had to sit back and tell myself those fateful words that Alonso said to Massa at the Nürburgring in 2007: ‘You need to learn!’

Stepping out into the Mediterranean sun for lunch, I began to enthuse gently (whilst keeping my cool, you understand!) with Aris, but the information was still setting it, slowly, about this sim and what I had just tried out. Things were coming to me as I ate my Pappardelle at the Ristorante da Righetto (con ragu di cinghiale o di lepre, and yes, it was delightful, and yes, it was the boar not the hare), things kept coming to me as we drove back to the airport, and the damn thing was still stuck in my head when I was finally walking back through the door at 23.30 that evening.

Assetto Corsa, at this early stage, feels superb to drive, and the team admit that this was their first mission. The potential in, what is, a very early alpha of the software, is remarkable, and truly reflects to me the next generation of racing simulators that will come our way. There is a long way to go, and potential for this sim to get even better. As it stands, the laser scanned tracks in full DX11 glory look stunning, and run smoothly on hardware that is far from top-end. The driving experience, for me, represents the beginnings of a sim that could go on to great things. For now, we must all sit back and wait, and watch those tantilising shots appear on the AC facebook page as the weeks tick by. For me, it will be even more difficult as I contemplate that hot Italian summer and the warm Autumn until finally I will be able to embrace it again …