Volume 28 — December 18, 2006
By: Che Chou
From the editor's desk
At long last, we're back from the great Puget Sound wind storm of 2006. As many of you know and have come to expect, the Turn 10 Weekly Pitpass Report is a regular newsletter/blog/column/what-have-you we do every Friday that summarizes on the progress of Forza Motorsport 2, as well as life behind-the-scenes here at Turn 10 studios. (Psst, if you'd like to check out what we've been up to for the past 6 months or so, head over to our archive section.) At least, that's barring any unforeseen acts by mother nature and/or Godzilla.
Last Friday, we had a nifty little Pitpass Report prepared for you, featuring an indepth interview with Aaron Ogus, Turn 10's software engineer and the prime mover behind Forza Motorsport 2's incredibly immersive triple-screen simulator mode. Unfortunately, a massive wind storm pummeled the Seattle area to a bloody pulp, leaving hundreds of thousands without power, including the entirety of the Microsoft campus. Friday was a ghost town here at the Microsoft's Millenium campus as downed power lines and corpses of wayward trees made coming to work a pointless endeavor. Throughout the weekend, Turn 10 troopers trickled onto email to report on the status of them and their loved ones — often with a side note about the state of the current FM2 build. Even during a mild crisis, their minds never strayed far from the game.
Although, by Monday, most folks had power once again, there were still a handful here at Turn 10 who'd still be trapped in the proverbial stone age if it weren't for their gas-powered electric generators. By the end of the day, most services were coming back online, including the authoring servers for Microsoft Game Studios websites. We apologize for the extreme delay in delivering what will be the final Pitpass Report of the year, and thank you for waiting patiently.
The Turn 10 Weekly Pitpass will return to its official publishing schedule beginning Jan. 8th, 2007. In the meantime, we'll try and update the site as often as possible through the circumstances of travel abroad (Japan) and flakey Internet connections.
In the meantime, have a great holiday season — be safe, and enjoy this interview!
Forza Motorsport 2: Panoramic Style
A Conversation With Turn 10 Developer Aaron Ogus
As one of Turn 10's network coding engineers on Forza Motorsport 2, Aaron Ogus specializes in making Xbox 360s talk to each other in its own special language. Like many other developers here at Turn 10 with a fierce passion for cars and motorsports, Ogus migrated from other parts of Microsoft to come work on the Forza Motorsport project.
Aaron Ogus (left) discusses triple-screen setup with game director Dan Greenawalt (right)
One of his pet projects during the original Forza was pushing for the implementation of a triple-screen panoramic setup for the game which allowed players a wider view of the track by using three system-linked Xbox consoles. The result was an immediately impressive and grand racing experience, especially when coupled with a good racing cockpit/seat arrangement and the solid Fanatec Xbox racing wheel.
On its way from being last-gen to next-gen, Forza 2 retained its unique triple-screen capability on Xbox 360. We were able to get hands-on with the triple-screened beast all last week and the road tests from folks all over Microsoft Game Studios have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. So much so that we thought it might be a good idea to give you guys a peek (as well as a chat with Ogus) at what the team has been buzzing about with triple-screen, and why you should seriously consider getting a couple of your friends together and combining your 360s to form the ultimate racing cockpit experience.
Q: Aaron, you've really been a driving force for the implementation of triple-screen for Forza 2. Can you give us some background on yourself, and maybe why you're so obsessed with the triple-screen concept?
Aaron Ogus: I began racing seriously in 1999. I was racing Formula Mazda in the SCCA Oregon Region. A number of the guys I raced against started using Ferrari F355 Challenge from Sega to practice their racing. F355 was the best simulator at the time it came out, it used 3 screens to give the driver a full 180 degree view and the ability to look into tight corners, it had excellent force feedback and a very solid cabinet. The designer of F355 Challenge Yu Suzuki was a great Ferrari enthusiast who had taken a bunch of telemetry data off his own F355 at various tracks and used that data to drive the simulation. The result for the time was amazing.
Q: Yeah, F355 was a nice arcade game. It even had a gated shifter with clutch. So this was the starting point for your triple-screen obsession...
Aaron Ogus: Yeah. I decided over the winter that I would practice with F355 Challenge to keep my racing skills up in the off season fairly cheaply. The following summer, I won the Oregon region championship for Formula Mazda. Naturally I became a big advocate of racing simulators. I even went out and bought my own F355 Challenge to practice during the following winter. I still have that unit at home, despite my wife’s periodic protests. I don’t use it much but it is still an inspiration that drives me to help make Forza better and better, so a new generation of racers can find racing more accessible.
Q: Did you ever meet Yu Suzuki?
Aaron Ogus: I had a brief chance meeting arranged with me and Yu Suzuki while he was visiting Seattle. He didn’t speak English very well, and I don’t speak Japanese, so we had a translator. I told him how his simulator had helped me win many races and he was very enthused. We also discussed some of the deficiencies of F355 Challenge and what could be done to improve it. He had thought of many of the things I suggested but limitations in the capabilities of the hardware at the time and the necessity of keeping the game accessible had reduced what he could do somewhat.
Q: So then you brought those ambitions to Forza...
Aaron Ogus: I eventually stopped racing professionally and was invited to join the Forza version 1 team as network lead. I have a long background in networking and actually networking the game peer-to-peer wasn’t that much of a challenge for me, so I wanted to do something more reaching. Besides developing the networking in Forza, I helped the team as a racing consultant, and I decided to work on a side project to add the 3-screen mode to Forza v1. Although not many people use this feature, it was great to show off the game with. It was used at 3 different trade shows and always was an attention grabber.
Q: Yeah, I remember seeing Forza for the first time at E3 and it was hooked up as a triple-screen simulator with racing seat. I was immediately reminded of F355 Challenge, among other racing sims. So how does it come together?
Aaron Ogus: The way the 3 screen mode works is actually a modified version of the peer networking in Forza. We change the view in the game so that each peripheral screen covers a fixed number of degrees and we mount the camera on the peripheral screens onto the user’s car. We then keep a very tight synchronization between the machines so that the view appears to be from the user’s car. Really the view from the user’s car on the center screen, and from the network image of the user’s car on the peripheral screens. Remote cars are also replicated onto the peripheral screens. In Forza v1 each multiscreen view networked against the cars in the peer-to-peer session, which could lead to divergence of the images. In Forza v2 we peer network the remote cars to the multi-screen host and then re-network them to the multiscreen clients. This keeps the remote car images much more stable.
Q: Wait, if it's basically just networking 3 boxes together, does that mean we can still play Forza 2 over Xbox Live, let's say, while running the game in triple-screen mode? Also, could you theoretically have a 360 degree cockpit mode with 6 Xbox 360s?
Aaron Ogus: Yes, multiscreen is fully enabled in Forza. That means all game modes are available including over Xbox Live. Although you could network more boxes to get a 360 degree view, you are already getting 180 degrees with 3 screens. The extra screens seem very expensive for a little more information. I would advocate instead using the “rear view” multi-screen setup where you can have a rear view on 1 monitor. That way you have a very accurate hires 360 degree view with just 1 more screen (for a total of 4 screens and 4 xboxes). Finally, to throw some numbers out there — if you are running a 3 screen multiscreen setup at 720p you are pumping over 600 Mbytes/sec of video data. And that’s just the final display data, that isn’t including all the intermediate data used to represent the scene.
Q: So you think you've done it? Y'know, beaten F355 Challenge at its own game?
Aaron Ogus: With force feedback support coming in Forza v2 we have pretty much exceeded Ferrari 355 Challenge on all fronts as a simulator. The only place F355 Challenge still exceeds us is probably in its packaging. Having a very stable cabinet setup is very helpful. I think though we’ve developed something that will let any racer go from the basics to being a professional racer. Just racing Forza will not make you a pro racer, but if you take some racing classes first, and then go and play Forza, your racing skill will improve dramatically. When you take your lessons from Forza back to the track you will have leapfrogged your competition by getting years worth of racing experience at a fraction of the cost.
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