Razorworks development team have invested a remarkable amount of time into bringing real car dynamics to the gaming public with the development of their latest Racing Sim, Total Immersion Racing. Existing driving games have notoriously made very rough estimates of the forces and physics involved and simply script other events such as cars' handling, moving around corners, and racing events like skidding or spinning off. This invariably leaves a general impression of poor realism.

Total Immersion Racing heralds a new era in physics modelling by providing 100% commitment to simulating realistic car handling. This is the first time this level of technology has been brought to the gaming market in such an application.

CAR PHYSICS SIMULATION

TIR racing physics engine is a "Runge-Kutta-4" integrator. This provides the realistic vehicle movement

The integrator runs @ 100 iterations per second (100Hz) which updated the position, attitude and behaviour of the racing cars 400 times every second (400 Hz)

CAR MODEL

'Car Model' is a complex component based system that models each element of a real car

Final result is number of forces that are fed into the physics engine

Modelling each component separately means they can be treated as individual black boxes, each accepting certain inputs and producing outputs

TYRE SLIP ANGLE

Driving motion is created by the angle of the steering wheels thus creating an angle between the way the tyre is pointing and the way it is actually moving. This is called a 'Slip Angle'

These forces are fed along with every other force into the Physics engine for computing the vehicle movement

This is all accurately modelled in Total Immersion Racing with tyre deformation, tyre wall stiffness, tread depth and inflation pressures

AERODYNAMICS MODELLING

The Aerodynamics model actually models the car as a number of aerofoils and calculates in real-time the exact downforce and drag of each. These are then applied to the physics engine

Final result is a very realistic aerodynamic model that naturally allows high-speed downforce, slipstreaming behind other cars and cross wind effects

Empire Interactive and the Razorworks development team are very proud of the depth of physics, authenticity and gameplay offered by Total Immersion Racing. As well as the physics engine, a high level of authenticity is offered by the Car Models and Track reproduction- data sourced from the manufacturer and Track CAD data.

Platform: PlayStation® 2, PC CD-ROM, XboxTM
Release: NOV 1st 2002
Age Rating: ELSPA 3+ (TBC)
Developer: Razorworks