Volume 42 -- April 13, 2007

By: Che Chou

Listen to the Sound of Speed...

Welcome one and all to the Turn 10 Pitpass Report, our weekly update on Xbox 360's premiere (and soon-to-be-released) racing sim, Forza Motorsport 2. Although it feels absolutely impossible that new folks are still just discovering this website and the Forza Motorsport phenom, traffic stats tell us another story -- Forzamotorsport.net had its biggest month in March thanks to all of you, and April has been blowing away all traffic records. These numbers also tell us that we've been getting new readers on the site each day, while FM.net forum membership sign-ups remain consistent as ever (over 100 new members each day). So in case you're one of the new ones who has wandered in from the icy cold of the storm back East, welcome -- and do check out our WPR archive for past weekly rants and nonsequitors.

So let's get the bad news out of the way first. What I'm about to say will inevitably piss off a bunch of you who have no doubt waited patiently all week for hi-res gameplay videos to go online. Sorry, there will be no video action this week. The 720p gameplay videos have been done for a while now, and were handed off to a press site (we're not at liberty to disclose which site got the exclusive) in hopes they could work it into their editorial calendar sometime this week. Alas, it didn't happen. We were told by our PR folks that the site will post their video next Monday. It's quite out of our control, but we feel bad about it all the same. The good news is that 1). it's literally right around the corner and 2). we actually made two videos.

The second video will be hosted yet another site and this one is a mixture of the livery editor in action, car on-track, and photo mode, all rolled up into one binary burrito. Both videos should be up next week. One final thing to note about the press side of things is that we're also sending out official preview builds next week to get lucky editors playing the game, posting their hands-on impressions, grabbing photo mode screens, capturing video, and generally going nuts with media. Again, we don't control how and when journalists post their stuff, but I wouldn't be surprised if by this time next week, the forums were buzzing with discussion on FM2 media and assets.

Meanwhile, life at Turn 10 has been more insane than ever. We're ever-so-close to finishing this game -- nothing can stop us now. For the next week or so, the team will be putting the final touches on their labor of love, and then it's out of our hands and into those of the disciplinarians over at Xbox 360 certification team who put the code through all the necessary stresses before we reach "gold" status. Here at Turn 10, our infantry of testers continue to hammer on the game, including non-stop multiplayer mayhem. It's fun stuff just to turn on "Forza TV" and watch the action unfold on my 360 devkit. In fact, I would show you some of the screenshots that have been captured from these crazy multiplayer races, but our licensing manager would destroy me.

The point is, this stage of the project will soon be finished -- then it's onto post-release afterlife (aka downloadable content). But ask me no questions and I tell you no lies. We currently haven't much bandwidth to think about DLC, except that it will come and that it will be good. As for which cars, tracks, etc... well your guess is as good as mine. Well, maybe not quite as good, but you know what I mean.

The Forza 2 Marketplace Demo is Coming!

And thanks to a full-page ad in a recent issue of Official Xbox Magazine, you already knew that. Although the real question keeping a lot of you up late nights is when when when, and in that respect, I regretfully do not know. We're currently cranking to finish both the final game and the demo (well, the two are somewhat related, no?) simultaneously, which means both versions are being tested and bug fixed with the same Turn 10 fervor. So the good news is that the demo is basically finished when the game is finished. Of course, this trial version will also need to be submitted for certification; but being a downloadable demo on Xbox Live Marketplace means there's no huge delay in waiting for the game to get pressed, packaged, and shipped onto shelves.

But equal amounts of you have also been asking for details on what exactly the demo will feature -- which car(s), which class(es), which track(s), multiplayer? To answer some of those questions, I will reveal to you what I can about the FM2 demo that you're all going to be downloading and playing until the game comes out. So here we go. The Forza 2 demo will indeed feature a handful of our favorite cars in the game, separated into three different classes (C, A and R2) to give you a taste of the automotive flavors across the spectrum of the roster. Although I'm not going to reveal the R2 cars right now (remember, we conclude our car list next week with the full list of our Race class cars), here are all the cars you can play around with in the other two classes:

These 16 cars A and C class cars will be completed by 8 more Race class beasts for a full list of 24 demo vehicles. Although you'll be able to cycle between the different manufacturer colors for these cars (obviously, not the R2 cars), we're holding back on all of the sweet customization stuff for the final game. Besides, there's no point in decking out your ride and then not being able to save the design or upgrades after you exit the demo. The races themselves will be exhibition style (i.e., against 7 other A.I. driven cars) on one of our new tracks. What about the other functions of the game?

Although there was discussion about including our innovative Xbox Live features in the demo, we wanted this playtest to focus on core gameplay elements -- like how it feels to drive our wide selection of cars at 60fps, the visuals on a new tracks, the damage, wheel-to-wheel racing, stuff like that. Most importantly, it gives you a very good idea about how the game feels -- something that will certainly be amplified by the demo's support of the 360 force feedback wheel. Again, the when question is still an unknown, but the good news is that it won't be much longer now!

Next up, I'd like to shine a huge foglight on an aspect of racing games often overlooked. Why? Because after having watched a certain video by one of our competitors this week, my appreciation for the audio in FM2 has shot up even more. It's just a shame that a game should have its pretty face marred by absolutely primitive car audio. So in the spirit of audio appreciation, let's take a look (and a listen) at all the reasons why Forza 2 really will set the bar for racing sim audio come May.

Forza Motorsport 2: Listen to the Sound of Speed

By: Greg Shaw, Turn 10 Audio Lead

Why do I believe Forza Motorsport 2 will be the best sounding racing game available?
The audio team that has worked on this game is absolutely the crème of the crop.  Everyone from our audio developers (programmers) to the sound designers, to our content coordinator and of course to our audio testers has really stepped up and worked tirelessly to establish a new bar for audio quality in the racing genre. It truly is amazing what you can accomplish when you get people that are dedicated to producing the best quality product available. A perfect example of this is that we all believe we are “students of audio”. We are constantly investigating why various mechanical devices make sound the way they do. This is important because many parts of a car make sounds for reasons that are really a side-effect of the actual phenomenon.  For example, transmission gears for example are primarily made to move a car; the sound two gears make when they connect together at a high rate of speed is a side-effect of what they were designed to do.

There is another reason why I believe Forza Motorsport 2 sounds great, and that is the physics engine the game runs on is very realistic. In a racing sim, if you experience audio weirdness or unnatural sounding glitches, it usually is because the physics engine isn’t doing something right. In our case we had very little issue in this area. So when we hooked up audio to change based on physics parameters, things just worked like you'd expect based on real-life parameters. 

One easy way to get a sense of just how realistic Forza 2 will sound is by comparing actual audio sources. Sometime last year, we dyno'ed a spirited Porsche 911 GT3 (996) to grab source audio for the car in our game. Linked below are two recordings. The first one is a raced-out 911 GT3, and the other is the actual recording of the car with an upgraded exhaust in the game. These two audio files should help demonstrate how serious we are about getting the sound of each vehicle in the game just right. No tricks or post-processing here -- what you hear in the second file below is lifted straight from the game.

• Porsche 911 GT3 (996) Source Recording
• Porsche 911 GT3 (996) In-game Audio

Next up, we have collisions. In developing Forza 2, the first thing we all knew we wanted to do was to improve our collision audio. We actually had several meetings early on regarding steps we can take with audio to help communicate the “violence of racing”. Improving our collision audio was first and foremost on our list. The problem was we didn’t quite know the best way to upgrade the sounds.

So while we debated on the best way to improve our collision audio we decided to put placeholder sounds in the game as best we could to help us identify the short-comings in our current implementation. We went to commercially available libraries and scoured every single previously used sound that we had. I mean we're talking about sounds like dropping a car from a crane 25 feet in the air. 

We cut and edited and chopped and sweetened the audio. We got the quality to as good a state as we could and put all the sounds in the game working with all the physics parameters required. I think of this as similar to writing a script before going to shoot a movie. Putting these temporary sounds in the game was one of the best things I think we did. With the placeholder sounds in the game we knew exactly what was wrong. The problem was not with our implementation it was with our source audio. 

We discovered that our source audio lacked the sense of velocity that a typical high speed collision would yield. I mean the force that is generated with these kinds of speeds is tremendous. We were about to find out just how tremendous these forces can be. Our solution to getting better source audio was to go to a crash reconstruction facility and utilize the knowledge of experts to help us get the sounds we needed.

It turned out this recording session became expensive enough that we didn’t want to come back with a lack of results. So we doubled up on everything that we would need.  We doubled the team that would record. We brought 5 separate recording rigs and even conducted a practice recording session where we dealt with similar recording challenges.  During our actual session every take utilized 26 separate and unique perspectives. It was one of the largest remote recording sessions I’ve ever been on. 

When all was said and done we worked tirelessly in extreme desert heat conditions. We sported brand new sunburns, a strong desire for sleep, and learned enough about collisions to make us wear seat belts when just backing out of a driveway. Most of all we got exactly what we needed to make crashing in Forza 2 violent enough to startle you out of your seat. 

The link below is a car moving at just 60mph when it crashes into a concrete barrier. Listen to it again, because those are the actual sounds you'll hear in the game. I'll be back in another WPR to talk about other aspects of why Forza 2 sets the bar for audio this generation. Enjoy.

• The sound of a 60 mph collision. Ouch.

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