The gRally development team has released a new development blog, focusing on the development of the virtual co-driver.
As in real rallying, a capable co-driver to give proper pace notes is key for a realistic rallying experience and the independently-developed rallying simulation will cut no corners in that regard, as you can see below.
Hello world!
this is the first post I wrote on our new website/blog and I???d like to share some thoughts about the challenges of developing a virtual co-driver that looks like a real co-driver.
When I started developing gRally and I needed to hear the pacenotes, so I started with an efficient and basic method: From the stage editor I simply put the notes in the place where I wanted to hear them.
The result from this first attempt was good, which made me feel great…
but in the end it wasn???t my real goal, because it wasn???t the right way to customize the notes.
So I tried to do the exact same things a real rally driver does with the pacenotes. Here is a good video where driver Hayden Paddon shows his style.In gRally you basically need to do a ???recce??? which consists off trying to drive the perfect line on a stage without steering corrections, in order to avoid coding errors.
So our system is a work in progress but this will give us the incredible flexibility of managing the pacenotes and last but not least, doing so in right way, ???cause the number of the note derives from the radius of the turn and not by a modder???s subjective point-of-view.
There???s something I want to bring up??? what kind of pacenotes do you like?
I???ll try to explain another way: looking at many rally car cameras, it seems the number of the pacenotes spoken by the co-driver is inversely proportional to the experience level and cleverness of the driver.
Some minor drivers want their co-drivers to tell them everything, and I wish understood how their brain processes all the information they hear. Other world rally co-drivers on the other hand only tell the basics of the turn few additiona notes.
At the moment gRally co-driver only tell the basics, ???cause we???re working hard to find the right solution/syncronicity to play the pacenotes. However, some other minor notes are very good to hear ???cause they give us the feeling of having a ???good??? co-driver, yet reduce the essentiality of the note call. I???ll wait for your feedback???
For more on gRally, visit the gRally website here.
