F1 2015: You ask Codemasters

Formula 1 makes its first appearance on the latest generation of gaming consoles with the release of F1 2015 on Xbox One and Playstation 4 (plus PC) this week.

But this is not a game review. This is a chance for AUTOSPORT's readers, fans of F1 and gaming, to put their burning questions regarding racing games in general to Lee Mather, principal games designer for Codemasters on F1 2015.

What we've gone for is a selection of more generic questions on F1 gaming, rather than the usual specifics on minor features regarding the latest version of the game.

While the game is now out the work never stops for its designers - work is already under way on a car-model update (including the new McLaren livery) and tweaking the performance of the cars to match the way the development race is playing out.

"We get a week to recover and then we're straight back into it, but it's all worth it," says Mather. And with that, it's over to your questions:

How is Codemasters working on making the AI [artificial intelligence] of the drivers better? They always seem to be too passive in racing games.
@DDracea, via Twitter

LM: A very small group of cars would be a lot easier to manage. But when they all get together there's a lot to take into consideration. One of the things we've worked hard on is giving them more knowledge, down to the fact that there's more memory in the new consoles, so the AI are more aware of everything.

They've got a better understanding of their car, so they drive better, and more awareness of what's going on around them. In the past there were areas like braking off-line where we couldn't train them so well, but now they can drive much more effectively off the racing line, which makes them much harder to race with.

Previously you could bully them off the road and just chop their nose off, but now they are much more resilient and will hold their ground against an aggressive driver.

Watching people play this game to start with, they were driving it very similar to the previous titles. They'd overtake an AI car and just turn straight across the front of it.

You can't do that now because you'll get tipped around. You've got to treat the AI as you'd treat a real player.

Do you get any feedback from real F1 drivers about the game?
@NicoNilsson, via Twitter

LM: We've had Anthony Davidson involved this year again. He started giving some feedback a few months ago. The feedback he was able to give we've fed into the 2015 car updates that we're doing.

He's still a massively valuable resource for us. He still drives the simulator for the Mercedes F1 team so he understands how to give good feedback to us. I guess the feedback you would give to a real race engineer would be slightly different to when you're developing the simulator, so his feedback is always really valuable.

The F1 drivers tend play it towards the end of the process, more or less when it's finished. It's hard to get them involved during the development because they're incredibly busy people. Sometimes we take the game to them, and they'll have plenty of feedback.

They get very engrossed in trying to do better, so they go quiet because they're intensely playing the game. They're such competitive people. Back in 2010 when Lewis Hamilton played it, he was all jokey and chatty for a while, and then his brother started beating him and he went quiet because he started concentrating properly. Even winning on a game was important.

Is it really difficult to make the game a simulation game?
@TheAngineer, via Twitter

LM: Obviously it requires a talented team of programmers, in particular someone who's good with physics, which we've got. Building the cars you need a strong understanding of how tyre models work, and suspension, and the relationship between the aerodynamics, the suspension and the tyre loads. Thankfully we have that in our team of car handling guys.

Since the first games we've learned a lot about how these systems interact, and how they work in the world of Formula 1. For this game we've replaced most of the systems with totally new ones, so it's a new tyre model, new physics. It's significantly different, you can really tell it's totally different to the previous games.

There is a balance between simulation and accessibility for mainstream gamers, but we start out with an incredibly detailed simulation. We have to, because we're expected to bring in the tyre side of things, which brings into it the wear, temperatures, marbles, picking up grass, the feeling in the wet. We have to do all that because otherwise it wouldn't feel right for the people who do want to play at the hardcore end of the simulation scale.

Then we add in all the assists to make it more accessible to other styles of gamers. But we start at the tough end of the scale and add in assists to make it more accessible.

Could we ever see a manager mode, and would there ever be a way around the legal restrictions that prevent you from having drivers switch teams in a career mode?
Lewis Jones, via Facebook

LM: In previous games we allowed the player character to move around through a contract system in the career mode. But we can't move real drivers from one team to another due to their contractual and sponsorship agreements.

We've spoken in-depth with Formula 1 about things we'd like to do in the future, and they are very open to some of the ideas we've got. It really does give us the opportunity to do some new things with the game in the future.

We had the career mode before which was getting quite stale, and we didn't feel we were able to improve it any further. So we've taken a break from that with F1 2015 to give us a chance to open the dialogue over what we can do with it in the future. We want to do something a bit special.

Have you considered putting GP2, GP3 etc on the games?
@Joshcommentator, via Twitter

LM: The time involved in doing so - particularly the sign-off process that would be required - would be vast, but it's a regular conversation we have. Putting in GP2 as a feeder series would be amazing.

Anything that adds more content, especially as cool a series as GP2, which is a really exciting category to watch, would be great fun. I imagine it would feel like old-school F1.

It would be a very challenging thing to do but we certainly discuss it on a regular basis.

Have you ever thought of creating custom drivers to put in existing teams?
@CoolKevF1, via Twitter

and...

Why is a track designer never in any of the games? Also why can't you customise the cars to include different liveries?
David Williams, via Facebook

LM: To answer both of those, we can't do anything that modifies the existing teams and drivers - that's an official fixed thing that we can't touch.

Regarding the other things suggested, they are things we always look into and we'll continue to investigate them for the future.

There's a lot of stuff that we'd love to do and as our relationship with Formula 1 gets better and better they become more open to us doing more wider-reaching things within the realms of the licence.

What are the first stages of making a brand new racing game on next-generation consoles?
@MrDangerDaysF1, via Twitter

LM: From a design perspective we look at all the cool stuff we want to do that we felt was restricted by the lack of power in the previous generation of consoles. We want better physics, better tyre modeling, better environments, we want better character models so we can showcase the drivers more.

Then on the code and the art side, we'll look at areas they didn't think looked great in previous games that they can improve on. All the departments look at it from a slightly different angle and then there's a large discussion that takes place in terms of where we use the extra performance and extra memory.

It can be that if you do too much in one area you compromise another. We want to get the best balance between all of the areas of the game.

This is the first game for us on the next-gen consoles so we've had to learn all of the processes that are required to support things hardware wise. And in the optimisation process it's still early days, but we've got the game running at 60 frames per second, which is pretty outstanding, and that was done through the optimisation phase.

But the hardware leap this year is nowhere near as strange as before. The PS3 was a challenge, but the Xbox One and PS4 generation is really just an increase in performance rather than a total redesign of any hardware, so we can apply a lot of the stuff we've already learned.

Can you make a version for a season in the eighties?
Steven Gower, via Facebook

LM: I wouldn't say it's impossible, but it would probably be the biggest challenge we have ever tackled. If you look at a season from back then, the vast majority of those teams don't exist anymore. Some of them have changed hands, some of them have disappeared off the face of the planet, some of the sponsors no longer exist.

Some of the drivers are not with us anymore, and certain ones are impossible to track down because they just withdraw from the sport completely. A lot of things require sign-off by relative parties.

If you remember the selection of cars we had in F1 2013, we started with a huge list of famous cars and drivers we would have liked to use, and we whittled it down. There were certain ones we couldn't track down.

We would have loved to include the Jordan team, but it was impossible to work out who owned the rights to use it. It's very hard to establish who owned the rights to what, and who would be required to say yes or no to things.

Also, there are teams that have licensing agreements with other video games for some of their classic cars, so they can choose whether they want to be involved or not.

If we were to try to put together a full season I would say that would be probably the hardest thing we've ever tried to do. I'd be shocked if we managed to pull that off - and that's not just a Codemasters thing, I think it would be virtually impossible for anyone to pull all of those things together.

My favourite games were the Microprose 'Grand Prix' series on PC. Do you take any inspiration from those titles, or do you guys have old favourites of your own?
Simon Lear, via Facebook

LM: I've played the majority of F1 games up to the mid-2000s, when I took a bit of a break. But there were less of them around by then. I've played all of the Microprose games, in fact I've still got Grand Prix 4 on my desk.

When I played the first of the series on the Commodore Amiga, I did a full season on full distance! It got to the point where the buttons on the joystick failed and I had to replace them because they'd had that much use. That is probably my fondest memory of Formula 1 games.

But I also tortured myself with Grand Prix Legends, which was probably the hardest racing game I've ever played. But there was some real enjoyment to the constant wrestling with the car that's sliding around like it's on a sheet of ice. And the audio - the sound of those old cars was outstanding.

Believe it or not, there was a Formula 1 game on the Nintendo 64 which was really good as well - F1 World Grand Prix. It was a surprisingly good game, that one, I really enjoyed playing it. And then obviously there was a bit of a break until Codemasters did F1 2010. That's when I played F1 games seriously again.

In terms of presentation style, there are a lot of things those old games did really well. And the Geoff Crammond Grand Prix series was absolute genius for how the controls and assists were done to allow people to play the game with any type of controller.

To allow you to be able to play a game well on a keyboard, a joystick or a steering wheel - these days they may feel a little heavy handed - was incredible how they made it so accessible, and you still felt that you were making the difference.

You can't believe that it was possible, but I've occasionally played our games on a keyboard and it's still really enjoyable.