Race Driver GRID - part two of Three Speech's Clive Moody interview…

Threespeech writes: "Here's the second part of our interview with Race Driver: GRID senior producer, Clive Moody. Here, he tells us all about the game's ludicrously complex damage modeling system, hints at downloadable content and touches on how Codemasters will approach its forthcoming F1 title…

Threespeech: The GRID damage model is very impressive…

CM: It's been a long haul getting there! But then, we have a lot of experience with damage modeling, it's always been a feature of the TOCA and Race Driver games, and we just keep refining and perfecting it. We've actually put pretty much an entirely new damage system in Grid – and again it's something that the Ego engine has allowed us to do. It's a different system to what you saw in CMR Dirt…

Threespeech: In what way?

CM: Just in the way that the damage functions. I mean, the slow motion is an important element of it, and in order to do that, there's been a fundamental step change in the way that we calculate the deformation. Previously, the car would collide with an object and you'd have a single calculation that would ascertain the damage – a two-step function. Now we're doing that as multiple calculations – the damage calculation is being applied for every single frame of the game, so it's bending and crumpling frame by frame. And what that allows us to do is slow the process down and let you watch the whole thing happening in slow motion. It's a big change, and a complicated system, but realism is important."