Formula One Grand Prix (video game)

Formula One Grand Prix
Box Box
Developer(s)	Microprose
Publisher(s)	Microprose
Designer(s)	Geoff Crammond
Platform(s)	PC (DOS), Amiga, Atari ST
Release	1992
Genre(s)	Sim racing
Mode(s)	Single player, Multiplayer

File:Grand Prix Game Screenshot.jpg

Game screenshot

Formula One Grand Prix (known as World Circuit in the United States) is a racing simulator released in 1992 by MicroProse for the Amiga and PC created by game designer Geoff Crammond. It is often referred to as Grand Prix, MicroProse Grand Prix, or just F1GP, although the game itself was not affiliated officially with the FIA or any Formula One drivers. The game is a simulation of Formula One racing at the time and was noted for its 3D graphics and attention to detail, in particular the players ability to edit the teams and drivers and set up their car to their own personal specifications. Grand Prix's success spawned 3 "sequel" games, unsurprisingly named Grand Prix 2, Grand Prix 3 and Grand Prix 4. These were, however, exclusively PC games.

Impact on the racing simulation genre

F1GP is generally considered one of the biggest milestones in the history of the sim racing genre. Together with Papyrus' Indianapolis 500: The Simulation, which was released about a year earlier, it was the first serious 3D polygon-based racing sim (that is, without textures, except some for the scenery in the PC version). Geoff Crammond's REVS on the Commodore 64 and BBC home computers also did a great job already, but was too much limited by the relative lack of computer power of the 8-bit machines. Although Indy 500 was strictly speaking first in pioneering many novel features, F1GP would make a bigger overall impression and impact because it featured Formula One, and because it offered the player a complete season to compete in.

When Indy 500 and F1GP appeared, they were the very first to implement something that resembled real world racing physics, accurate track modelling and car handling that required skills somewhat similar to real-world driving skills to perform well. Both were also the first to offer meaningful options to tune the behaviour of the cars. Although not quite on the level of later simulations, the most important stuff like gear ratios, wings settings etc. were there, and, more importantly, proved to make an actual difference when driving. Important were also the functional rearview mirrors and a replay system with variable camera settings that made many jaws drop at the time.

It was a completely new experience for players to actually recognise where they were on which Formula one track. For the very first time in a racing sim, it made a difference how you entered a corner and how soon or late you accelerated out of it. Unlike lots of previous 'simulations', the 1/1000th of a second precision chronometer made sense and was not just window-dressing. Players could actually feel whether they were driving fast or slow, whether they were burning up their tires or conserving them... Concentration was absolutely required to avoid mistakes and to remain consistent. Together with the 16 tracks and the atmosphere-packed rendition of complete Grand Prix weekends, it made F1GP a totally captivating experience.

Two more aspects worth mentioning are the driving-help and the drivability by keyboard. F1GP was built on a system that allowed for an almost perfect learning-curve. Depending on which helps were activated, the game covered playability from a pure arcade-racer level up to the most advanced sim-level available at the time. Players could choose to activate innovative help-functions like brake-assistance, displaying an ideal-line to help learning the layout of a track, suggestions for the best gear and others. Perhaps the most impressive achievements in that respect were the steering help and throttle assistance. At the time F1GP was released, analogue steering wheels were far from mainstream. In fact, even joysticks were still mostly digital, and in that respect no different from a keyboard. In order to compensate the strict on-off nature of digital controllers, Geoff Crammond implemented a method to 'smoothen' the inputs. Throttle assistance prevented wheel spin when going on the gas. Steering help smoothened the steering actions (as an indication, one would experience cars steering slightly into corners all on their own when this help was activated). This was a subtle exercise, as it could give the impression of cars driving themselves when implemented too strongly. As experience showed, an excellent balance was found. Which turned F1GP, and its successors, into probably the only racing games ever that could really be enjoyed and played well via digital input devices.

As an aside, it is illustrative for the depth of the game that people actually learned to overcome the need for Throttle Assistance when using the keyboard, and discovered that disabling it and applying the right techniques enabled 'digital' drivers to go faster (at the expense of tirewear).

Critiques

Despite these great achievements, F1GP also contained a flaw that was pretty irrelevant at first, but would later seriously compromise the potential of the game and its successors.

Geoff Crammond wrote the game long before the era of DirectX, OpenGL and 3D acceleration video cards. So F1GP was built around a 'proprietary' 3D engine that ran in software. This engine was set up in such a way that a fixed frame rate had to be chosen (up to 25.6 fps on the PC version), and the game would at all times try to render the specified number of frames.

The result was that the engine would never drop frames when the CPU couldn't handle the rendering in realtime. Instead, gametime itself was slowed down. The software itself provided an option to display the CPU-load. When this was higher than '100', the game was no longer working in realtime. This would become known in the community as the infamous slow-motion driving. Since the rendering was obviously dependent on the complexity of the scene, this also meant that one could experience slowdowns of the action only on certain parts of certain tracks, or when there were lots of cars around (for example at the start).

The game did provide options to eliminate trackside details, and in addition one could also choose a lower framerate to avoid the problem altogether. It also has to be understood that gamers didn't have quite the same expectations of framerates as nowadays. The unmatched quality of the 3D representations in itself was enough to impress people. So all in all, the actual impact on single-player gaming was not that important.

There are three reasons, though, why it became a serious burden later on:

1. the Grand Prix series would never offer solid network multiplayer possibilities, largely due to this design choice; successors like Grand Prix 3 and Grand Prix 4 offered LAN-play and were even hacked to be playable over the Internet, but would never perform reasonably.
2. even when the first boom of 3D acceleration chipsets revolutionized gaming, the concept was not reworked (too much integrated into the software?) and remained a problem (although less because of the available computer power)
3. the effect could be misused to artificially slow down the action, and exploit the extra reaction time that became available to the player that way. Although irrelevant if one played the game on its own, it caused a lot of trouble for online competitions (see below).

"Online" gaming and community

F1GP was among the first wave of games that had a busy online community. The first competitions were organized via online services like Compuserve in 1993, jumping over to the Internet once that became mainstream.

The racing didn't actually happen online. F1GP only offered modem play. Thus, the competitions were based on submitted save-games of races and practice laps. These were then used in competitions around complete (or partial) races on the one hand, and so called Hotlap Competitions on the other hand. Often, the races followed the schedule of the real world Formula One competition.

The community spawned a host of mods, making the game highly customizable for its time. Liveries, car-performance and the performance of the computer-opponents, camera-settings... could be edited. First attempts at a track-editor emerged, but this would only become reality after the arrival of the successor Grand Prix 2.

Because of the possibilities to edit the performance of the car, or to make other aspects of the game favour the player, there were also a lot of utilities to check for cheats. These could handle just about every possible trick that was available, except one: the mentioned slow-motion driving effect. The game didn't store the CPU-load data, which could be displayed via a function key, in any save game file. So there was no way to exclude the possibility that someone maximized the graphics detail on purpose to force a slowdown of the action.

In practice, F1GP was already an 'older' game when online competitions appeared. This meant that most used computers could easily handle the highest detail at the highest framerate. As such, F1GP-based competitions were actually not hit by the slow-mo cheat. Both because the communities were small, and because nobody seemed to reckon the possibility because of the CPU-power surplus.

Its successor Grand Prix 2 though, was notorious for its high CPU-demands. When it appeared, there were no systems available that could handle it at full detail. Most people had a hard time to find a good compromise between details and smooth framerate, and the majority was probably playing in moderate slow-motion without being aware.

When the Grand Prix 2 community materialized and exploded far beyond what F1GP ever offered, it soon became apparent that some participants in the competitions submitted results that were totally unrealistic. Telemetry-data files even showed typical signs of slow-motion driving (like supernatural gearchange speeds) but there was no way to unambiguously prove it.

This problem kept bugging the community for several years until the utility GP2LAP was developed to monitor and log the CPU load dynamically during the driving.

Magazine reviews

• ZERO 93% "There's no denying F1GP is brilliant stuff."

• CU Amiga 95% "For once, the pre-release hype is certainly justified. So much so, in fact, that F1GP is hard to fault. One of the best games to ever grace the Amiga."

• ACE 930 "A triumph of both programming and design, F1GP isn't so much leading the pack as lapping it."

• Amiga Power 92% "F1GP succeeds on every possible level and dumps on everything else from a great height."

• Power Play (GER) 82% "Ein Rennspiel der Extraklasse"

• Gamer 93% "Each race becomes engrossing to the extreme. Brilliant."

• Amiga Joker (GER) 85% "Mehr als nur ein Rennspiel. Hier stimmt einfach alles. Eine wasch-echte Simulation!"

Modern-day developments (2006-)

Chequered Flag screenshot

Despite the sheer age of the game and the fact that it is both technically and graphically inferior to modern racing simulators, F1GP still has a small active community and on-going developments relating to the game. At the forefront of this community is one of the last known active locations for this game, found at the racing game website SimRacingWorld. A single section is reserved for F1GP in which downloads and articles from the past remain accessible to anybody interested in the game. In addition to this, any new developments which are of benefit to the community are made available by means of the section news and public forum.

In more recent times, these developments have been limited to small-scale community updates and the development of a new open-source game editor called Chequered Flag. However, the introduction of Chequered Flag deserves notable mention; as a unification of previous editing tools and the introduction of new game modification facilities are promised. Despite the slow speed of the development process, the progress achieved has been good and a number of screenshots were released on the 3rd of September, 2006 to give an indication of the editor construction state. A full-scale release of the first version is expected in the near future and will be available on the Chequered Flag home page.

External links

• Grand Prix at MobyGames
• F1GP section on SimRacingWorld
• SimRacingWorld home page
• Chequered Flag home page