The bar has been raised, fellas.

Wow.













http://youtu.be/wOxYVlw6oLU

http://youtu.be/q7DKUMSAtEE

http://youtu.be/LtLcyHFpNAI

 

Yes please.

 

Three months ago, Slightly Mad Studios’ Ian Bell shared his vision of a community-funded simulation title right here on VirtualR. What many may have dismissed as a very much utopianklar vision has gotten extremely real as the studio has been hard at work for the past few months to turn a great idea into a working project.


Named Community Assisted Race Sim, or C.A.R.S. for short, the project will allow ordinary sim racers to become investors in a racing simulation title and get a share of the profits and unmatched access to the development process and a say in the title’s direction.


For the past few months, the guys at Slightly Mad Studios have been hard at work on all fronts as Ian Bell has revealed some exclusive details on the team’s progress. The legal work on the project has just been completed and SMS is ready to launch the project’s website and accept investors within the next 2-3 weeks.


The studio will be offering investment options that will fit any budged, starting out with a 5€ option ending with gold-level commitment of 1000€ and beyond. All investors will be getting access to downloadable development builds throughout the development process, the level of investment will determine the amount of influence each member has though.


While every investor will get to vote on the direction the new title will take, gold members get to participate in board meetings where the bigger calls will be made, always considering the requests from the regular investors. Gold members will even get source-code access to the simulation while smaller investors will be given script access to play with.


Slightly Mad Studios promise a completely transparent development process as all investors get to follow every single bit of progress and every single discussion the developers will be having. The SMS team will work out in the open for all investors to see, there will be no closed-off development forum as all investors get to follow everything the development team does, “even the arguments,” as Ian Bell points out.


C.A.R.S will be used the stripped-down Shift 2 Unleashed engine as starting point, as the team will be adding new modules to it during the course of the development process, including a new DirectX 11 renderer, a new physics engine and new AI. Slightly Mad Studios expect a development cycle of at least 12 months until the finished product is ready, however all investors will be getting access to development builds throughout the process to keep everyone entertained.


Below is a first high-resolution preview, showing an immensely-detailed historical Lotus Formula One car in the garage. SMS is planning to release the first build shortly after the first investors joined, the first release will include a handful of cars and tracks to try out. The base content won’t be too advanced though as the investors will have the final say in the direction that the title will take and what content will be included.


SMS is planning to have fully-licensed content in the finished product, the team may be dealing with generic content in the development builds though while the licensing is being finalised in the background.
For years now, sim racers have been bemoaning the publishers lack of interest in sim racing and the missing influence on developing titles. It looks like Slightly Mad Studios will be changing all that with C.A.R.S.

 

Looks promising and since it was made by the studio who did the NFS Shift series I know it will be good. With the exception of the controls in Shift (on pc) was really buggy.

 

Anyone on this?

I downloaded it with a TeamMember+ account the other day and have been hooked like crazy. Not many cars as of yet, bet there are weekly updates.

The only thing in common with Shift its got is SMS's wicked attention to detail. It handles nothing like it. That, and in the development stage EVERYTHING is able to be tweaked....from the angle of the headlights, to camera shake, to the blur, etc.Its also got dynamic weather and time of day on every track is amazing. You can set the weather "forecast" so a shower or two will randomly pop in as well as how fast the day progresses from 1x to 240x.

If you have a decent rig...get it. I get 60-70fps with my i7 2600k @ about 4.5ghz.

 

Damn how did I miss this? It looks great!

 

 

There is no photomode integrated yet, so this is a gameplay screenshot.

 

whoa

Is this PC only? I haven't liked games on my Mac since The Sims

 

Right now yes, but they are building it for all the consoles.

 

Can't wait!

 

Im all setup to take screenshots. If anyone wants to see anything in particular from times of day to different weather conditions or tracks/cars, let me know!

Everything is a work in progress, but with weekly builds things are coming together nicely. Some tracks are more detailed than others at this stage.

 

Wow

Any shots of the weather conditions?

 

These were all taken at 1:30pm (in game).

There are 5 different presets for "Clear" all have variations of haze and very light clouds. All clouds are dynamic, which means they grow and...do cloud things as you race as well as cast dynamic cloud shadows. You can pick what conditions the weather starts as and what the "forecast" will be, as well as temp...different temperatures effect the tire grip as well as parts of the track that are in the shade or effected by cloud shadows. You can also race in 10x, 30x, 60x or 250x real time to speed up transitions and weather.



Wipers are controllable by the driver and have excellent animation. They also cast a shadow across the dash which looks very nice.

Helmet cam was recently added. Like all the views (bumper, hood, in car, helmet, roof, chase) it is adjustable from FOV to shake to lean.

Clear


Light Clouds


Med Clouds


Heavy Clouds


Overcast


Hazy


Foggy


Light Rain (Kinda hard to see, but its there. Think..sprinkling)


Rain


Storm


ThunderStorm

 

Whoa.

Forza needs to step their game up.

See what I did there?

 

They're doing ok considering the limitations of the 360.

 

Well...its not getting any uglier. Still a ways off from final...unedited shots straight from the game using ctrl-print sceen,

 

wow!